Bayer & The EPA: More Than Just A Secret Meeting

Three out of the four EPA appointees named in the clandestine meeting with Bayer have previous ties to the chemical company. We have the receipts.

Investigative journalist Carey Gillam, the same reporter who broke the Monsanto Papers, published a bombshell this week through The New Lede. Internal EPA records reveal that four senior agency officials sat down with Bayer CEO Bill Anderson in June 2025 to discuss “legal/judicial issues,” including “Supreme Court action” over the company’s glyphosate weedkiller, Roundup.

Gillam’s reporting exposed the meeting. But you don’t have to scratch far below the surface to see how corrupt the seats around that table really are.

In December, Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court it should take up Bayer’s case. The Court agreed, scheduling oral arguments for April 27. On February 18, President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to shield glyphosate production and provide immunity for its makers. Bayer cited that executive order in its Supreme Court brief five days later.

On March 2, Sauer filed an amicus brief throwing the full weight of the United States government behind Bayer’s fight to kill Roundup cancer lawsuits. A private meeting. Then a cascade of government actions. All flowing in one direction.

But the meeting itself isn’t the story. The story is who was in the room.

The Table

Four EPA officials attended that meeting with Bayer’s CEO. Not one of them belongs near a conversation about public or planet health.

Lee Zeldin, EPA Administrator.

Credentials — A former congressman from Long Island with zero environmental or scientific credentials. Lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters: 14 percent. His final year in Congress: 5 percent.
Voting record — Voted to slash EPA funding. Voted against the largest clean energy investment in American history. Voted against carbon pollution limits. Voted against methane standards.
Industry money — Over $400,000 in campaign contributions from oil and gas. More than $60,000 from Koch Industries alone.
Dark money — A CREW investigation found evidence that energy industry donors funneled money through dark money super PACs. He sits on the board of a Trump-affiliated dark money operation and refuses to name its donors.
Since taking office — Rolled back PFAS drinking water protections for four forever chemicals. Moved to rescind the endangerment finding, the legal bedrock of every federal climate rule on the books. Hundreds of his own EPA employees sent him a letter asking him to stop lying to the public.

Nancy Beck, Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator, Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. The office that regulates toxic chemicals? She runs it.

2002-2012 — Reviewed EPA chemical regulations from inside the Office of Management and Budget. A congressional investigation found she deliberately edited scientific evaluations to “enhance uncertainty” and delay protections on toxic flame retardants.
2012-2017 — Senior Director of Regulatory Science Policy at the American Chemistry Council, the lobbying arm of Dow, DuPont, ExxonMobil, Chevron Phillips, and Bayer. Her job: write the industry’s arguments against the regulations she used to oversee.
PFAS — Rewrote forever chemical rules to let companies skip EPA approval. Blocked her own staff from warning Congress about a loophole in the law.
Formaldehyde — Signed off on an assessment that nearly doubled the amount of formaldehyde considered “safe” to breathe.
CPSC nomination — Trump tried to promote her to chair the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Ninety scientists opposed her. Even Republican senators said no.
June 2025 — Sat in the room with Bayer’s CEO and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to discuss Supreme Court strategy. Months later, the full weight of the federal government landed behind Bayer’s fight to kill Roundup cancer lawsuits.

Sean Donahue, EPA General Counsel.

Role — The agency’s top lawyer. The man providing legal counsel on Supreme Court strategy to the room that day.
Qualifications — His legal career before this appointment: 18 months as an associate at the law firm Phillips Lytle. They fired him.
After that — Associate counsel at a small solar farm company in Rochester. During Trump’s first term, held non-legal administrative posts in EPA’s land and public records offices.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s assessment — “The most unfit nominee ever for any federal agency’s general counsel.”
The stakes — That is the resume of the person advising the EPA on a Supreme Court case that could reshape pesticide liability law for a generation.

Turner Bridgforth, Senior Adviser for the Office of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

Before the EPA — Registered lobbyist for Corteva Agriscience, the agrochemical giant spun out of the DowDuPont merger.
What Corteva is — One of the Big Three in global agrochemicals alongside Bayer and Syngenta. Maker of herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and seed treatments. Over 300 crop protection products sold in 110 countries.

Why Corteva Matters to This Story

Corteva manufactured dicamba — the herbicide notorious for “drift.” It vaporizes after application and floats into neighboring fields, destroying crops that aren’t engineered to resist it. The USDA estimates 15 million acres of soybeans were damaged by dicamba drift in 2018 alone. A Missouri peach farmer won a $75 million verdict after drift destroyed his orchard. Federal courts struck down EPA’s approval of dicamba as unlawful. Twice. In 2020 and again in 2024.

Corteva eventually pulled its dicamba application. But Trump’s EPA reapproved dicamba in 2026 and is already being sued for it.

Then there’s PFAS. Corteva inherited DuPont’s forever chemicals legacy in the DowDuPont breakup. The damage: a $4 billion settlement over PFAS contamination. $875 million to New Jersey alone. Another $2 billion settlement on top of that. Chemicals linked to cancer, infertility, and thyroid disorders that will remain in the environment until someone actively cleans them up.

A Supreme Court ruling that shields Bayer from cancer lawsuits over Roundup wouldn’t just help Bayer. It would set the legal precedent that could protect Corteva from dicamba drift suits and potentially PFAS claims too.

Bridgforth wasn’t just in the room. He had skin in the game.

The Pattern

Look at the table one more time.

A politician who took $410,000 from polluters and has no environmental background. A chemical industry lobbyist who spent five years writing the playbook against regulation, then walked back inside the agency to run the office that writes the regulations. A lawyer so unqualified that a sitting senator called him the most unfit nominee in the history of any federal agency. And a registered Corteva lobbyist whose former employer stands to benefit from the very legal precedent being discussed.

This wasn’t a meeting between a government agency and a corporation. This was a meeting between a corporation and its own people who happen to hold government titles.

The Guardian reported this as a meeting. It’s not a meeting. It’s a tell.

The EPA — the agency created to protect human health and the environment — is being run by the people it was designed to regulate. The foxes didn’t sneak into the henhouse. They were appointed. Confirmed. Given titles and badges and government email addresses.

And in June 2025, they sat down with Bayer’s CEO and discussed how to help the company avoid accountability for a product that has been linked to cancer in human beings.

Every government action that followed — the Solicitor General’s filing, the Defense Production Act invocation, the amicus brief — flowed from that room. From that table. From those people.

This is not public service. This is corporate occupation of a federal agency.

And it is happening in plain sight.

Sources and further reading:

Three out of the four EPA appointees named in the clandestine meeting with Bayer have previous ties to the chemical company. We have the receipts.

The Table

Why Corteva Matters to This Story

The Pattern

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