Imagine getting pulled over for speeding and having the police officer hand you a menu: Would you prefer a $300 fine, a $100 fine, or a warning?

 

That would be a strange way to enforce the law, yet newly released internal documents suggest something uncomfortably similar happened while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was developing rules for dicamba, a controversial weedkiller sold by Bayer and other companies.

 

Dicamba is an herbicide used to kill broadleaf weeds, including weeds growing among genetically engineered soybean and cotton plants designed to tolerate it. The problem is that dicamba does not always stay where farmers spray it. Tiny droplets can drift during application, while the chemical can also evaporate after spraying and move through the air as vapor. EPA itself acknowledges that this off-target movement has damaged neighboring crops and other plants and can affect wildlife and pollinators.

 

This is not a theoretical problem. EPA reported that complaints involving damage to plants increased substantially after new over-the-top uses of dicamba were introduced in 2016. Even after restrictions were added in 2020, EPA later found little change in the number, severity or geographic reach of reported dicamba incidents.

You might expect that history to make regulators especially cautious. Instead, documents reported by The Guardian show EPA officials presented Bayer with several possible restrictions aimed at reducing dicamba’s volatility and runoff and asked the company which options it wanted to move forward with.

 

Bayer reportedly selected the least protective option for one measure and the middle option for another. Those choices then appeared in EPA’s proposed registration.

 

EPA says this kind of communication is part of the normal pesticide regulatory process. Companies that register pesticides routinely provide data and suggest ways to reduce risks, while EPA says the agency ultimately makes the regulatory decision. That distinction matters, and the final 2026 registration did include substantial restrictions, including lower annual application limits, larger amounts of volatility-reducing agents, temperature restrictions and a ban on spraying when temperatures exceed 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

But that does not make the process less troubling.

 

A regulator needs information from the companies it regulates. Bayer knows its product and can provide useful technical data. There is a big difference, however, between asking a company how a chemical behaves and asking which level of protection it prefers.

 

That difference goes to the heart of regulation. Companies have a responsibility to their businesses. Regulators have a responsibility to the public. Those interests sometimes overlap, but they are not the same.

 

Dicamba provides a useful lesson in how environmental protection can be weakened without eliminating a single regulation. You do not have to abolish the EPA, repeal a law or announce that corporations can regulate themselves.

 

You can keep the regulator, keep the rules and keep the paperwork.

 

Then you can ask the company which rules it would prefer.