Pesticide watchdog groups say the regulations should be strengthened, not thrown out.
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Pesticide watchdog groups say the regulations should be strengthened, not thrown out.
June 3, 2025
June 3, 2025 – Many farmers will no longer have to keep any records of when, where, or how they’re using pesticides known to pose the highest risks to human health and the environment after a recent change made by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
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On May 12, the agency rescinded regulations on the books since the 1990s that required farmers to record basic details about their use of pesticides classified as “restricted use.” Farmers were required to record the chemical’s name, date of use, volume, location, and type of crop treated, and to keep the records for two years.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classifies pesticides as “restricted use” (RUPs) when they are known to cause serious health and environmental harms when used without following specific precautions outlined on the label. The EPA’s current list of RUPs is 45 pages long and includes products containing chemicals such as paraquat, atrazine, and chlorpyrifos, which are linked to health harms like Parkinson’s disease and birth defects.
Although the USDA required farmers to record the data, neither the USDA nor the EPA collected it from farmers, and anti-pesticide groups and researchers have long pressed for better records that could be used to assess health and environmental impacts from the chemicals. The records were low-hanging fruit; although the agency wasn’t collecting the data, it was theoretically available. Now, that may no longer be true.
“It matters in that this was one of the legs to better understanding potential adverse impacts of pesticides,” said Jay Feldman, the executive director of Beyond Pesticides, a nonprofit that advocates against the use of harmful pesticides. In his mind, while the regulations were incredibly weak to begin with, eliminating them entirely is a step in the wrong direction. Instead, he said, “I would like to see it improved and better implemented.”
In the notice that it was eliminating the regulations, USDA officials wrote that “upon reviewing these regulations, USDA has determined that they should be rescinded due to their obsolescence.” The agency hadn’t been collecting the records since 2012 due to funding constraints, they wrote. They added that 23 states have their own recordkeeping regulations, and some pesticide applicators keep records to comply with a different rule, the EPA’s Worker Protection Standard (WPS). However, that leaves 27 states without state-level regulations, and the WPS requirements are different and don’t apply to all farms.
In rescinding the regulations, the USDA did not follow the typical rulemaking process of proposing a change, taking public comment, and then finalizing it.
In the notice, the agency officials said the regulations are “not a priority” and that “to the extent there is any uncertainty about the costs and benefits [of the regulations], it is the policy of USDA to err on the side of deregulation.”
“That says it all,” Feldman said. “Federal agencies should be erring on the side of protecting public health and the environment, not erring to protect a political motive to deregulate.”
Coming on the heels of the Make America Healthy Again report, which calls some attention to how exposure to chemicals may be harming children, he said it’s yet another example of how the Trump administration’s actions fly in the face of its messaging. “MAHA comes along and is pointing to all of those problems,” he said. “One could argue quite easily that deregulation will make all of that worse.”
After initially granting an interview request to Civil Eats, the USDA’s press office rescinded the offer and was unable to send emailed answers to the questions provided by press time. (Link to this post.)
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At our latest Civil Eats virtual salon, our team talked about the launch and evolution of the Tracker, a running report on federal actions that affect food and agriculture.
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