Read almost any article defending Roundup and you will hit the same sentence within a paragraph or two: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer. It is treated as the trump card, the settled fact that ends the argument. It is also, as a matter of the regulatory record, not settled at all. In 2022 a federal appeals court examined that exact finding, decided it did not hold up, and vacated it. The agency then withdrew the whole decision it came from. As of this writing, the EPA has still not issued a final replacement.
The Fact Everyone Cites, and the Part They Leave Out
The EPA's public posture on glyphosate has for years been that the chemical is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” That phrase, drawn from the agency's cancer analysis, is the backbone of every “Roundup is safe” talking point. It is also the reason the product has never carried a cancer warning on its label, a fact that turned out to be decisive at the Supreme Court in 2026.
What that talking point almost never acknowledges is what happened to the finding in court. The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reached the opposite conclusion in 2015, classifying glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A). We have written at length about that disagreement between IARC and the EPA, which sits underneath the entire litigation. This article is about something narrower and, for anyone following the cases, more surprising: the EPA's own conclusion was rejected by a United States Court of Appeals, and the agency has not put a final one back in its place.
What the Ninth Circuit Actually Did in 2022
On June 17, 2022, in Natural Resources Defense Council v. EPA (No. 20-70787), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the human-health portion of the EPA's 2020 interim registration review decision for glyphosate and sent it back to the agency. In plain terms, the court struck down the part of the EPA's decision that declared glyphosate not likely to cause cancer and ordered the agency to do that analysis over.
The court's reasoning is the striking part, because it was not a disagreement about chemistry. It was about logic. The EPA's own cancer paper stated that the agency “was unable to reach a conclusion” regarding the association between glyphosate exposure and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Yet the same document announced that glyphosate was “not likely” to be carcinogenic. The Ninth Circuit held that an agency cannot logically treat “we could not reach a conclusion about the main cancer of concern” as consistent with “this chemical is not likely to cause cancer.” That internal contradiction, the court found, meant the conclusion was not supported by substantial evidence, the standard the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) requires the EPA to meet. The reasoning, the panel wrote in effect, has to be coherent and internally consistent, and this reasoning was not.
It is important to be fair about the limits of what the court held. The Ninth Circuit did not find that glyphosate causes cancer, and it expressly noted that the EPA could potentially reach the same “not likely” conclusion again on remand, provided it resolved the contradictions and explained itself in a way that satisfied the evidence standard. The ruling was about the adequacy of the agency's reasoning, not a scientific verdict. But the practical effect was concrete: the finding was vacated, which means it was wiped off the books, not merely criticized.
Then the EPA Withdrew the Decision Entirely
The agency's response removed any doubt about the status of the finding. On September 23, 2022, the EPA announced it was withdrawing “all remaining portions of the interim registration review decision for glyphosate.” Not just the human-health piece the court had vacated, the whole interim decision. The agency also acknowledged it could not meet a court-imposed October 1, 2022 deadline to finish a new ecological analysis.
Glyphosate products stayed on the market and continued to be used according to their existing labels, and the EPA was careful to say so. But the document that had housed the “not likely to be carcinogenic” conclusion was gone. The agency explained that before it can issue any final decision, it must prepare a proposed decision, publish it for a 60-day public comment period, complete ongoing Endangered Species Act consultation with the federal wildlife agencies, and work through several other analyses. The EPA has said it expects to complete the glyphosate registration review in 2026, but as of now no final decision has been published.
So the current state of play is easy to state and rarely stated: the EPA's most recent draft materials still lean toward “not likely to be carcinogenic,” but the agency has said it intends to “revisit and better explain” that evaluation, and it has not been finalized. What the public treats as a closed regulatory judgment is, in reality, an open one under court-ordered revision.
Why This Matters After Monsanto v. Durnell
On June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, holding 7-2 that FIFRA preempts state-law failure-to-warn claims where the EPA approved a pesticide label that does not carry the warning a plaintiff says was required. We covered that ruling in depth in our explainer on what Durnell means for Roundup cases. The honest way to describe the relationship between Durnell and the vacated EPA finding is with precision, not overstatement.
Durnell does not rise or fall on the 2020 cancer finding that the Ninth Circuit vacated. The Court's holding turns on the approved label and the EPA's decision not to require a cancer warning, which remains the operative regulatory reality. Vacating a 2022 human-health assessment does not undo the 2026 Supreme Court decision, and no one should tell you it does.
But the vacatur is not irrelevant, either, and here is where it fits. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissented, arguing that the majority rested on “a labeling requirement that does not exist.” And legal commentators reading the decision emphasized that preemption is not automatic, it depends on the clarity and depth of the agency's position on the specific risk at issue. Where the EPA's evaluation of a particular hazard is thin, contested, or unresolved, the preemption defense is at its weakest. The glyphosate cancer question is the textbook example of exactly that kind of unresolved evaluation: it was judicially rejected as internally contradictory, withdrawn by the agency, and never finalized. The idea that “the EPA has spoken clearly and glyphosate is safe” is precisely the premise the regulatory record does not support.
The Theory That Doesn't Depend on the EPA at All
There is a reason The Alvarez Law Firm has never built its Roundup cases primarily on what the EPA did or did not say. The theory we lead with is strict product liability based on design defect: the argument that the product was unreasonably dangerous as formulated, independent of the label and independent of any agency's carcinogenicity finding. A design-defect claim does not ask whether the EPA required a warning. It asks whether the formulation itself, and what Monsanto knew about it, made the product unreasonably dangerous to the people who used it as intended.
That distinction is why the EPA's unfinished review, while important context, is not the load-bearing wall of a well-built case. Durnell narrowed the failure-to-warn road. It did not touch the design-defect road, and the Supreme Court said as much by declining to reach those theories. The EPA's vacated finding is a useful answer to the “but the government says it's safe” refrain, but the cases that survive after Durnell are the ones that were never anchored to the government's say-so in the first place.
What This Means If You Were Diagnosed With a Roundup-Linked Cancer
A few practical takeaways follow from all of this:
- “The EPA says it's safe” is not the last word. The affirmative cancer finding behind that claim was struck down in court in 2022, withdrawn by the agency, and has not been replaced with a final decision. That is public record, sourced below.
- The EPA's evaluation is now a live legal issue. Because preemption after Durnell turns partly on how clearly the EPA evaluated the specific risk, the unresolved state of the glyphosate cancer review is more central to the litigation than ever.
- The theory your case is built on matters more than any headline. Claims that depend on the label were narrowed by Durnell. Claims built on design defect and strict liability do not depend on the EPA's finding and were not decided by the Court.
- The diagnosis and exposure record are still the foundation. A clearly documented qualifying cancer, such as non-Hodgkin lymphoma and its subtypes, together with a solid exposure history, is what any surviving theory is built on. Our overview of who qualifies for a Roundup lawsuit walks through what we look at.
None of this is a prediction about any particular case, and nothing here is a promise of any result. It is context, because the public conversation about Roundup has been shaped by a regulatory conclusion that is far less final than it is made to sound. Whether a specific case can move forward depends on the facts, the diagnosis, and the theories available under the law of the state where it belongs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the EPA officially say glyphosate causes cancer?
The EPA's draft position is that glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans,” but that conclusion does not stand on settled legal footing. In 2022, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in NRDC v. EPA vacated the human-health portion of the EPA's interim glyphosate decision, finding the “not likely” conclusion was not supported by substantial evidence because the same record admitted the agency could not reach a conclusion about non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The EPA then withdrew the interim decision and, as of 2026, has not issued a final registration review decision. So the EPA's cancer conclusion is currently a draft under court-ordered revision, not a final regulatory determination.
What did the Ninth Circuit decide about the EPA and glyphosate in 2022?
On June 17, 2022, in Natural Resources Defense Council v. EPA (No. 20-70787), the Ninth Circuit vacated the human-health portion of the EPA's 2020 interim registration review decision for glyphosate and sent it back to the agency. The court held that the EPA could not logically treat its own admission that it “was unable to reach a conclusion” about glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma as consistent with a finding that glyphosate is “not likely” to cause cancer. That internal contradiction failed the substantial-evidence standard. The court noted the EPA could potentially reach the same conclusion on remand if it fixed the reasoning.
If the EPA finding was vacated, does the Supreme Court's Durnell ruling still apply?
Yes, Durnell still applies. The Supreme Court's June 25, 2026 decision in Monsanto v. Durnell held that federal law preempts state-law failure-to-warn claims where the EPA approved a label without a cancer warning. That holding turns on the approved label, not directly on the vacated 2020 cancer finding. But the vacatur matters to the broader picture: commentators and the dissent noted that preemption depends on how clearly and thoroughly the EPA evaluated the specific risk, and the agency's cancer evaluation has been judicially rejected and remains unfinished. Design-defect and strict-liability theories, which the Court did not address in Durnell, do not depend on the EPA's cancer finding at all.
Why does the unfinished EPA review matter for my Roundup case?
It matters because the single most repeated talking point in Roundup coverage — “the EPA says it doesn't cause cancer” — is less final and less settled than it sounds. The affirmative cancer finding was struck down in court, withdrawn by the agency, and has not been replaced with a final decision. That does not decide any individual case, and it is not a promise about any outcome. It is context: whether a specific case can move forward still depends on the diagnosis, the exposure history, and the legal theories available under the law of the relevant state, evaluated on the individual facts.
Bottom Line
The next time you read that “the EPA has determined glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer,” it is worth knowing the rest of the sentence. That determination was examined by a federal appeals court, found to be internally contradictory and unsupported by substantial evidence, and vacated. The EPA withdrew the decision it lived in and has not finalized a new one. The regulatory record is open, not closed. That reality does not win a case by itself, and after Durnell the theory a case is built on matters more than any agency's talking point. But it does mean the ground under the “it's perfectly safe” narrative is far softer than the headlines let on.
At our firm, Herb Borroto, M.D., J.D., reads the pathology, the immunohistochemistry, and the oncology charts himself, and Alex Alvarez, Managing Partner and Board Certified Civil Trial Lawyer, evaluates which legal theory the exposure history can support. If you or a family member used Roundup and were later diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, B-cell Lymphoma, Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, or Multiple Myeloma, the free case review is exactly what it says: no obligation, and no fee unless we recover for you.