The HighWire@HighWireTalk
Farm Bill Showdown:
The pesticide liability shield is no longer in the farm bill. But what happened on the floor has to be seen to be believed.
@JeffereyJaxen walks through a night of congressional maneuvering that ended with a 280 to 142 vote adopting Representative Anna Paulina Luna's amendment, stripping three of the most controversial sections from the Farm, Food and National Security Act of 2026.
The sections removed would have granted legal immunity to chemical manufacturers including foreign companies from China and Germany for products like glyphosate and other herbicides, modeled on the same liability shield vaccine makers have enjoyed for decades.
Additional language that would have stripped states of their right to regulate pesticide use independently, handing that authority entirely to the EPA, was also removed by the amendment. The vote was a decisive win. What happened before that vote is a different story.
When the Luna amendment first came to the floor for a verbal roll call, the room filled with ayes. No audible nays registered. The chair looked at that result and announced that the nays had it. Luna immediately requested a recorded vote. The chair postponed it.
We play the audio twice, asking viewers to find a single nay in the recording. There are none. The chair's ruling stood until the recorded vote was forced through, at which point 280 members voted yes and 142 voted no, a margin that made the original ruling look exactly like what it was.
Also incorporated into the farm bill as it passed the House is Representative Thomas Massie's PRIME Act, a longtime standalone bill that would allow farmers and ranchers to sell locally processed meat directly to restaurants, households, and community members without federal USDA oversight, with inspection handled by local health departments in the same way restaurant kitchens are inspected.
Right now, a farmer selling steaks at a farmers' market typically has to route the animal through a large federally inspected processing plant, often owned by multinational corporations, before it can be sold. The PRIME Act changes that.
The farm bill now moves to the Senate, where additional provisions that extend the EPA's timeline for completing its glyphosate safety assessment remain in the text and are drawing scrutiny. Long story short?
Keep your eyes here.
