In any functioning market, consumers deserve information they can trust — and businesses need clear rules they can follow. Accurate, science-based product labels are essential to that balance. But when states start imposing their own special-interest-driven labeling mandates, science is thrown out the window and consumers are left to fend for themselves.
Just look at Proposition 65, California’s infamous chemical warning law. To comply, nearly every product — from potato chips and furniture to coffee cups and parking garages — now bears a “may cause cancer” label. There are even Prop 65 warnings on trees (yes, that’s real).
Many of these warnings have little grounding in real-world risk and defy common sense. They serve to bewilder, rather than inform consumers. The ubiquitous hazard warnings have ironically created their own hazard, a populace surrendering to indifference. With everything labeled “dangerous,” danger becomes the new normal, leaving consumers unable to discern “boy who cried wolf” hysteria from real and known health hazards.
This issue has emerged as a key problem in the regulation of crop protection tools today, as state legislatures in California and elsewhere have pursued labeling mandates that conflict with federal law and well-established scientific consensus.
If this patchwork approach continues unchecked, it will create an unworkable system that threatens consumers’ access to essential products.
What’s needed is straightforward: legislation to protect labeling uniformity. When the Environmental Protection Agency approves a pesticide label after years of scientific testing and review, that label should be the law of the land. And there are three good reasons to reaffirm this policy.
First, uniform labeling protects consumers by ensuring they receive reliable, science-based information they can trust. When states start writing competing versions, it creates uncertainty and erodes consumer confidence.
The EPA’s labeling process already involves extensive scientific review. Pesticides must be continually reassessed under federal law, and labels are updated as new data emerge. Congress created this system under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA, to ensure that product labels comply with federal law and reflect the best available scientific evidence. This process involves dozens of scientists reviewing thousands of studies — a substantial effort that few, if any, state regulators have the resources to replicate. At best, conflicting state labels duplicate existing work and, at worst, misinform consumers about actual risks.
Second, uniform labeling protects interstate commerce. Grounded in the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, the idea is that states cannot erect barriers to interstate trade — that’s the purview of Congress. When one state establishes unique pesticide labeling requirements, it effectively imposes those requirements on everyone else. Prop 65 is a prime example. It hasn’t just affected businesses and products in California, but it has effectively forced companies across the United States to adopt California’s warnings — undermining this bedrock constitutional principle.
Finally, uniform labeling is essential to a functioning free market. Businesses, especially small and mid-size manufacturers, can’t survive under a system where every state writes its own labeling rules.
Imagine having to print 50 different labels for every product just to stay compliant. That would be absurdly inefficient and extremely costly. Some businesses may stop selling key products altogether rather than suffer huge losses from this regulatory chaos.
For the companies that do try to comply, high costs would be passed along to retailers, farmers and consumers, who would pay higher prices for fewer options. It would do serious damage to our nation’s businesses and economic growth if we allow the proliferation of 50 state labeling rules.
That does not mean that states have no role in pesticide regulation. Reaffirming labeling uniformity under FIFRA would not affect states’ authority to regulate the sale and use of products within their borders. For example, they can determine where pesticides may be used, how they are registered with state regulators, and what licensing or certification requirements are needed. It’s an important principle of federalism that we should continue to safeguard.
A national standard for pesticide labels protects consumers, constitutional principles and states’ rights while preventing the economic chaos of a 50-state regulatory patchwork. Congress should pass legislation reaffirming labeling uniformity and restore some much-needed sanity to the labels we all rely on.