At its strongest, the piece offers a principled federalist and procedural critique. Malone correctly identifies a tension in the Trump administration’s posture: a movement that celebrated *Dobbs* for returning power to the states and *Loper Bright* for curbing agency deference nonetheless urged the Court to let EPA’s scientific conclusions shut down state tort claims. He makes a fair point that litigation, for all its flaws, has historically served as an unofficial investigative mechanism—uncovering internal documents, testing expert claims under oath, and compensating plaintiffs when agencies lag behind the literature.
His warning about regulatory inertia is also timely. EPA’s glyphosate registration review has dragged on since 2009, and the scientific conversation has expanded well beyond cancer to endocrine disruption, microbiome effects, and neurodevelopment. If EPA’s decade-old conclusions now immunize labels from state-court challenge, the agency’s delays carry heavier consequences.
Yet Malone’s framing occasionally overstates both the novelty and the scope of the ruling. FIFRA contains an express preemption clause, and the Court did not invent this doctrine out of whole cloth; it built on precedent holding that states cannot impose labeling requirements “in addition to or different from” EPA’s. To suggest the decision creates, for the first time, an “extraordinary concentration of authority” overlooks the statutory structure Congress itself enacted.
Moreover, Malone’s idealized portrait of juries as neutral arbiters of evolving science deserves scrutiny. Tort litigation relies on adversarial expert testimony and often produces inconsistent verdicts across jurisdictions. The patchwork he defends as a feature can look, to manufacturers and regulators alike, like a bug that subjects nationally uniform labels to fifty different standards. The administration’s argument for predictability was not merely corporate favoritism; it rested on a coherent, if contestable, reading of statutory text.
The essay also conflates two distinct questions. Whether Congress *can* preempt state tort remedies through a valid federal scheme is a settled constitutional principle. The more interesting question—the one Malone means to raise—is whether it *should*, and whether an agency captured by institutional inertia deserves that trust. Here, he is on firmer ground. If EPA becomes the effective gatekeeper for when new science reaches the courtroom, its delays, conflicts, and advisory-committee composition become matters not merely of administrative policy but of access to justice.
Ultimately, Malone’s piece is less a legal brief than a policy alarm. It succeeds when it asks why an administration promising to challenge the regulatory status quo chose to fortify EPA’s bulwark against state-court scrutiny. It weakens when it treats a textually grounded preemption ruling as an unprecedented judicial power grab. The essay is correct that the health implications extend far beyond glyphosate, but the remedy he implies—preserving state tort actions as a parallel regulatory track—requires a defense of tort law’s competence that he largely assumes rather than proves. Still, as a provocation to scrutinize EPA’s scientific independence and timeliness, the essay is a timely contribution to a debate that should not end at the courthouse door.
For more from the good doctor, check out Heartland Journal episode 323
