Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Joe Rogan he was not "particularly happy" with President Trump's executive order boosting domestic production of glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in American agriculture. The HHS Secretary made the comments during a Friday episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience," confirming what White House senior advisor Calley Means had already signaled days earlier.
Means said during a Thursday speech that the order was "disappointing" and that Kennedy was similarly "disappointed" about it. Kennedy went further on Rogan's show with his objections:
"I've spent 40 years fighting pesticides. I was part of the trial team on the Monsanto case, which was the team that won three cases in a row and then got an $11 billion settlement with Monsanto, which is now Bayer … But pesticides are poison."
Kennedy goes on to share what glyphosate is:
"They're designed to kill all life. It's not a good thing to have in your food … so it's not something that I was particularly happy with. Let me put it that way mildly."
Trump signed the executive order on Feb. 18. It invokes the Defense Production Act to bolster the production of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides in the United States, according to Daily Caller reports. The order drew backlash from some health advocates, particularly supporters of Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again movement.
This is where the story gets interesting, because the tension here isn't between Trump and Kennedy. It's between two legitimate priorities that conservatives take seriously: food independence and public health.
Kennedy made exactly this point on the podcast, defending Trump while laying out the scope of the problem:
"The president didn't create this system. He's dealing with a problem that was created long before, over the past 60 years, when, through federal policies and subsidies and the management of farming in this country — the agricultural management — we have addicted our farmers to these pesticides, and particularly glyphosate."
That word, "addicted," is doing a lot of work. And Kennedy backed it up with numbers that explain why the executive order exists in the first place.
Kennedy called glyphosate "the foundational pesticide of our food production system." The statistics he offered explain why:
Those numbers tell a story that neither the MAHA crowd nor the executive order's critics can wish away. American agriculture is structurally dependent on this chemical. Kennedy put it bluntly:
"If you banned glyphosate overnight, or if you got rid of it, or if somebody else cut off our supply, it would destroy the American food system."
That's the reality the Defense Production Act invocation is responding to. If the United States doesn't produce its own glyphosate supply, it relies on foreign sources for a chemical that undergirds nearly all domestic corn and soy production. From a national security standpoint, that's untenable.
What makes this story worth watching isn't the disagreement. Cabinet members hold different views on policy all the time. What matters is what Kennedy does with his position at HHS.
Kennedy had condemned glyphosate well before joining the administration. In a June 2024 social media post, he alleged it was "one of the likely culprits in America's chronic disease epidemic." He hasn't softened that stance. He's now inside the building, with authority over the health agencies that evaluate these chemicals.
The executive order secures the supply chain. Kennedy's job is to tell the country whether the product in that supply chain is slowly poisoning it. Those two missions can coexist, but only if the administration treats the MAHA agenda as more than branding.
Sixty years of federal agricultural policy created a food system that can't function without a chemical that the administration's own health secretary has spent four decades fighting in court. Unwinding that doesn't happen with a single executive order or a single podcast appearance. It happens through the boring, difficult work of shifting incentives, expanding organic production from 3% to something meaningful, and forcing regulatory agencies to produce honest science instead of industry-friendly conclusions.
Kennedy acknowledged the trap. He defended the president for dealing with the system as it exists. The question now is whether the administration will reshape the system or simply secure it.
The supply chain order keeps American agriculture from being held hostage by foreign producers. The MAHA agenda promises to free Americans from being held hostage by the chemicals themselves. Both goals are worth pursuing. The hard part is pursuing them at the same time.