Feb. 20 Policy Watch: Trump Orders More Glyphosate and Phosphorus Production

Why It Matters

The actions reshape agricultural inputs, climate policy, and biotech regulation, while accelerating nuclear‑energy supply chains and influencing federal research funding, signaling a coordinated shift toward industry‑friendly governance.

Key Takeaways

• Trump invokes DPA for glyphosate and phosphorus production
• EPA endangerment finding faces new appellate petitions
• Farm bill draft proposes uniform pesticide labeling
• X‑Energy secures first commercial SMR fuel license
• Trump nominates Jim O’Neill to lead NSF

Pulse Analysis

The executive order elevating glyphosate and phosphorus to a national‑security priority underscores the administration’s willingness to use the Defense Production Act to safeguard agricultural supply chains. By extending liability shields to Bayer, the move seeks to insulate the sole U.S. phosphorus producer from the mounting litigation over Roundup’s alleged health impacts, even as the Supreme Court prepares to hear a pivotal case. This strategy reflects a broader trend of framing commodity production as essential to economic resilience, potentially reshaping how agro‑chemical regulation balances public‑health concerns with industry stability.

Simultaneously, the EPA’s rollback of the endangerment finding has ignited a wave of legal challenges from environmental and youth groups, while the House agriculture committee’s draft farm bill pushes for uniform pesticide labeling that would limit state‑level health warnings. These regulatory battles intersect with Senate HELP Committee proposals to streamline FDA drug and device reviews, aiming to reduce trial delays and accelerate innovation. Together, they illustrate a coordinated effort to reduce compliance burdens for manufacturers, but they also raise questions about the adequacy of consumer protections and the role of scientific evidence in policy decisions.

Beyond agriculture and health, the approval of X‑Energy’s TRISO‑X facility marks a milestone for the commercial deployment of small‑modular reactors, positioning the United States to compete in the emerging HALEU fuel market. Coupled with the nomination of Jim O’Neill— a private‑sector technologist without a traditional research background—to lead the National Science Foundation, and Alabama’s preemption law limiting state environmental rules, the administration’s agenda signals a decisive tilt toward deregulation and industry‑driven innovation across energy, science, and environmental policy.

Feb. 20 Policy Watch: Trump orders more glyphosate and phosphorus production

February 20, 2026 · 11 min read

President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order on Feb. 18 calling for greater domestic production of glyphosate‑based herbicides and the elemental phosphorus needed to make them. Bayer, which manufactures the glyphosate‑based herbicide product Roundup, is the only producer of elemental phosphorus in the US.

Trump invoked the Defense Production Act, ordering U.S. Department of Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins to “determine the proper nationwide priorities and allocation of all the materials, services, and facilities necessary to ensure a continued and adequate supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate‑based herbicides.” The order also cites the Defense Production Act’s liability shield for companies producing the materials, stating that “No person shall be held liable for damages or penalties for any act or failure to act resulting directly or indirectly from … compliance.”

Bayer is currently embroiled in thousands of lawsuits with people claiming they have developed non‑Hodgkin lymphoma as a result of exposure to Roundup. On Feb. 17, the company proposed a class‑action settlement for most of these claims. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a related case, Monsanto v. Durnell, on April 27.

The executive order drew swift criticism from Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) activists and other environmental‑health advocates.

“Elevating glyphosate to a national security priority is the exact opposite of what MAHA voters were promised,” said Ken Cook, president and co‑founder of the Environmental Working Group, in a written statement on Feb. 18. “It’s a shocking betrayal to protect all of us but especially the people who live and work near farm fields where glyphosate is used.”

—Delger Erdenesanaa

Environmental, health, and youth‑climate groups have been the first to file lawsuits challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s final rule to overturn the endangerment finding, the scientific justification for regulating greenhouse‑gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

On Feb. 18, a coalition of 16 environmental and health advocacy organizations—including the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and the American Lung Association—filed a petition asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to review the EPA’s final rule on the endangerment finding. The same day, a group of 18 youth climate activists, represented by Our Children’s Trust and Public Justice, filed a separate petition. The suits will likely end up in the Supreme Court.

“This shameful and dangerous action by the Trump administration and EPA Administrator Zeldin is rooted in falsehoods, not facts, and is entirely at odds with the public interest and the best available science,” said Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO of UCS, in a statement.

On Feb. 12, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the agency had finalized the rule, which was published in the Federal Register on Feb. 18. Parties have until April 20 to file a petition for judicial review. The attorneys general of Massachusetts and California have separately said they will file lawsuits challenging the EPA’s final rule, though they had not responded to questions by publication time.

The endangerment finding has been challenged in court before. In 2012, fossil‑fuel industry groups tried to get the finding overturned, but the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it. The U.S. Supreme Court denied the appeal to review the case in 2013. The finding was similarly challenged and denied review by the Supreme Court again in 2023.

—Leigh Krietsch Boerner

U.S. House Committee on Agriculture chairman Glenn Thompson (R‑PA) released a draft farm bill on Feb. 13 that resurrects language on pesticide labeling and use that had been removed from the FY 2026 Department of the Interior appropriations bill.

Section 10205 of the proposed farm bill would require uniform pesticide labels nationally, preventing states and local governments from requiring health and safety warnings that depart from the product labels registered by the EPA or from holding manufacturers liable for not giving such warnings.

CropLife America, which represents the pesticide industry, praised Thompson for the draft bill. “Farmers need continued access to pesticides approved by the Environmental Protection Agency,” said president and CEO Alexandra Dunn in a written statement on Feb. 17. “We support the inclusion of several important provisions in this bill which support that goal.”

The section will likely become a sticking point for the farm bill, which the House agriculture committee plans to start marking up on Feb. 23. Ranking member Angie Craig (D‑MN) said the bill contains “poison pills that complicates if not derails chances of getting anything done,” in a Feb. 13 press release from the committee’s Democrats.

—Delger Erdenesanaa

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R‑LA) is proposing a sweeping set of changes to how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reviews new drugs and medical devices and oversees food safety.

In a report published Feb. 17, Cassidy, who chairs the Senate HELP Committee, stresses the need for the FDA to improve both the predictability and efficiency of the drug review process. One area of concern is the longer timelines of early‑phase clinical trials conducted in the U.S. compared with those in peer countries, which, the report argues, has pushed companies to start trials overseas; China recently surpassed the U.S. in the number of clinical trials it conducts. The FDA should consider easing the requirements for starting low‑risk Phase I studies, the report suggests.

The report further suggests that, to accelerate the development of cell and gene therapies, the FDA should be more transparent in issuing clinical holds—orders to delay a clinical trial because of patient‑safety concerns—and calls on Congress to enact more flexible requirements for the manufacturing of rare‑disease therapies, which the FDA has proposed. It also recommends that the FDA more frequently review the safety of food ingredients.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in response to a request for comment that “many of the themes outlined in the white paper align with work already underway at the agency and we look forward to continued engagement with the [HELP] Committee to advance these ideas.”

Though wide in scope, the report omits several key areas under the FDA’s remit. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told C&EN, “The senator has certainly captured most of the hot issues, but the most obvious thing that’s missing is vaccines,” adding that the report also fails to capture the importance of maintaining an experienced workforce at the FDA, whose size has contracted under the Donald J. Trump administration.

—Yaakov Zinberg, special to C&EN

The small‑modular nuclear‑reactor start‑up X‑energy has received a license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its fuel‑fabrication subsidiary, TRISO‑X, the company announced Feb. 13. The license allows TRISO‑X to receive and store high‑assay low‑enriched uranium (HALEU) at its Oak Ridge, Tennessee facility and process that material into TRISO fuel (tristructural‑isotropic fuel).

The license makes TRISO‑X’s plant the first fuel‑fabrication facility designed and licensed specifically to serve commercial small‑modular reactors. The uranium will come already enriched to between 5 % and 20 % ^235U in the form of triuranium octoxide (U₃O₈). TRISO‑X will then form poppy‑seed‑size spheres of uranium oxide and uranium carbide encased in multiple layers of pyrolytic carbon and silicon carbide, which are then encased in graphite spheres or cylinders for use in advanced reactor designs.

The nuclear‑fuel and technology company BWXT already makes TRISO in Lynchburg, Virginia, for the U.S. Department of Defense’s reactor programs and is working on a facility in Wyoming that would directly compete with TRISO‑X’s plant in Tennessee.

“Very few U.S. facilities are able to handle HALEU or make TRISO,” said Patrick White, who leads fusion‑energy work at the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force. “Though the site won’t be the first to produce this type of fuel, it does demonstrate that there’s enough interest in new reactors and HALEU TRISO fuel that a company is designing, licensing, and hopefully constructing and commissioning a facility in the near term to produce the new fuel commercially.”

TRISO‑X is midway through construction of its first production line in Oak Ridge, a $48.2 million plant with a planned capacity of 5 metric tons of uranium per year. When it starts up in 2028, the firm says it will be able to make enough TRISO each year for 11 of X‑energy’s small‑modular reactors. The firm already has contracts to install four such reactors at Dow’s Seadrift petrochemical complex in Texas.

—Craig Bettenhausen

President Donald J. Trump plans to nominate Jim O’Neill as director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The plans were first reported by the New York Times and confirmed to C&EN by White House spokesperson Kush Desai.

O’Neill, who served as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from Aug. 2025 until last week, is a former science‑and‑technology investor with close ties to billionaire Peter Thiel: he was managing director of Thiel’s venture‑capital firm and was CEO of the Thiel Foundation.

If confirmed by the Senate, O’Neill would fill a position that has sat vacant since April, when then‑director Sethuraman Panchanathan resigned after the Trump administration terminated more than a thousand NSF‑issued research grants and proposed a massive 57 % cut to the agency’s budget. Congress, however, recently passed—and Trump signed into law—an appropriations package that reduced the NSF budget by only about 4 % compared with prior levels. The NSF allocates more than 90 % of its budget for grants that support science and engineering research, facilities, and education.

O’Neill served in various roles at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the George W. Bush administration and was deputy secretary of HHS from June 2025 until his move to the CDC in Aug. 2025. He would be only the second NSF director in the agency’s history without an advanced science degree and the first without any scientific‑research experience.

“Jim O’Neill spent over a decade in the private sector helping identify and finance cutting‑edge technologies of the future. In the Trump administration, Jim O’Neill played a key role at HHS by slashing fraud and restoring the Gold Standard of Science over ideology as the driving factor behind agency decision‑making. This experience and track record of success will help Jim do a phenomenal job as the next director of the National Science Foundation to cement America’s dominance in scientific research,” Desai said in a statement emailed to C&EN.

—Yaakov Zinberg, special to C&EN

Alabama’s House of Representatives passed legislation on Feb. 18 that will prevent state agencies from creating environmental regulations that exceed federal requirements. The bill, which previously passed the state Senate on Feb. 3, now heads to Gov. Kay Ivey (R) to sign into law.

Currently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets minimum national standards that states need to follow. Most federal statutes give states the option to surpass these standards to address local environmental concerns. States can also create additional environmental rules where federal ones don’t exist.

The Alabama bill, in addition to preventing state agencies from creating more‑stringent pollution standards, also prohibits them from establishing rules in lieu of federal ones unless they can establish a “direct causal link” between pollutants and bodily harm.

In a Feb. 5 Alabama House committee meeting, supporters of the bill called the measure “pro‑business” and said it will give companies more‑predictable environmental guidelines to follow. They said it also closely aligns with President Donald J. Trump’s May 2025 executive order “Restoring Gold Standard Science.”

That executive order says that “when federal agencies are making decisions, they have to use the most credible, reliable and impartial scientific evidence available,” said Mark Behrens, speaking on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “That’s what this bill does,” he added.

Trump’s executive order has drawn heavy criticism from scientists. Many have said that although the scientific standards laid out in the order sound reasonable, they can easily be adapted by the administration to discount any scientific evidence it doesn’t approve of, even if it’s widely accepted in the scientific community.

Opponents of the Alabama bill raised similar concerns during the House committee meeting. Requiring state agencies to directly link pollutants to human bodily harm “is not sound science. That’s impossible science,” said Cindy Lowry, executive director of the Alabama Rivers Alliance, a statewide network of environmental groups working to protect Alabama’s water resources. She added that environmental and public‑health decisions are based on risk assessments, not direct causal links. “I want the Alabama Department of Environmental Management to have the authority and the tools they need to be able to determine what’s best for Alabamians,” she said. “The only tool out there is risk‑based science.”

—Krystal Vasquez