EPA Must Now Run Pesticide Safety Rules Past USDA—and Growers—for Economic Review

This bill is all about making the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) play nice when it comes to regulating pesticides. Specifically, it changes the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) to mandate coordination between the EPA Administrator and the Secretary of Agriculture. If the EPA decides a pesticide needs new safety rules—called risk mitigation measures—to protect people or the environment, they must now work directly with the USDA to develop them. Crucially, the EPA must also publish an economic analysis detailing the costs these new rules will impose on growers, state agencies, and others, effectively putting a price tag on safety changes before they happen (SEC. 1).

The Cost-Benefit Check-Out Line

For anyone who works in agriculture or eats food, this is a big deal. Right now, the EPA focuses primarily on the science of risk. This bill requires that any new safety measure—like requiring farmers to wear more protective gear or limiting when a pesticide can be sprayed—must first pass a mandatory economic review. This analysis isn't just about the cost; it also has to look at the benefits of the pesticide and specifically assess how the new safety measures reduce risk for the person applying the product. This means that before a new rule lands on a farmer’s plate, the EPA has to prove it’s economically sound, giving the agricultural sector a powerful new lever in the regulatory process.

Data Sharing and the Paper Trail

To ensure the EPA isn't making decisions in a vacuum, the bill mandates serious data sharing. When the EPA is reviewing a pesticide, they must coordinate with the USDA to get “agronomic use data” and information about whether alternative pesticides are available and economically feasible. Think of this as the EPA needing to check their homework with the folks who actually grow things. If the EPA gets this data and then issues a final decision, they must publish exactly what data they received from the USDA and explain, in writing, whether they used it or not, giving reasons if they chose to ignore it. This transparency is good for the public, but it adds significant administrative weight to the EPA’s process, ensuring every decision is meticulously documented (SEC. 1).

When Safety Meets Endangered Species

The bill also wades into the complex intersection of pesticide use and the Endangered Species Act (ESA). If the Interior or Commerce Secretaries identify actions under the ESA that affect a pesticide’s use—say, limiting spraying near a habitat—the EPA must coordinate with the USDA, Interior, and Commerce Secretaries. The goal is to align the ESA actions with the EPA’s existing risk and benefit evaluations. They also have to give feedback to the ESA agencies on how these decisions will impact the people who actually use the pesticide. This is an attempt to create a unified front across multiple federal agencies, which sounds good on paper, but coordinating four different agencies on complicated environmental rules is rarely a quick or simple task.

The Unexpected Escape Clause

Here’s the provision that raises eyebrows: coordination requirements are not mandatory if the EPA Administrator, the Secretary of Agriculture, and the pesticide registrant—that’s the company that makes the pesticide—all agree to waive or modify them. They have to publish this agreement, but the fact that a private, profit-driven entity (the registrant) gets a seat at the table to mutually agree to bypass safety coordination with government agencies is unusual. While this could speed up processes when everyone agrees, it creates an avenue where economic interests could potentially override a more robust, independent safety review simply by getting two agencies and the industry itself to shake hands on skipping the red tape (SEC. 1).