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Pesticides/Residues

A Federal Court Rejected EPA's "Not Likely" Finding on Glyphosate in 2022. EPA Still Hasn't Replaced It.

Published August 21, 2026

Two government bodies looked at the same weed killer and reached opposite conclusions on cancer risk. That disagreement is four years old. What's less widely known is that the more recent of the two conclusions, the EPA's, was thrown out by a federal court in 2022, and as of today the agency still hasn't issued the replacement finding it promised.

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, in agricultural use since 1974. In March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified it as "probably carcinogenic to humans," IARC's Group 2A designation, in Monograph 112, based on what the agency judged to be limited evidence in humans, sufficient evidence in animals, and strong evidence of DNA damage in laboratory studies. It's worth being precise about what that classification does and doesn't say: IARC classifies hazard, whether something can cause cancer under some set of conditions, not risk, how likely that is at the levels people actually encounter. Group 2A also contains red meat and very hot beverages.

The EPA's standing scientific position is that glyphosate is "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans" at real-world dietary exposure levels, a conclusion the agency has maintained on its own ingredient page through at least May 2026. But that conclusion has a hole in it that predates this year. In June 2022, the Ninth Circuit vacated the human-health cancer portion of EPA's 2020 interim registration review decision, ruling not that glyphosate causes cancer, but that EPA's "not likely" finding wasn't adequately supported by substantial evidence — the court found the agency had applied a stricter statistical standard than its own guidelines required and leaned on selectively chosen historical control data. EPA withdrew the rest of the interim decision that September, stating its underlying scientific view hadn't changed but that it would revisit and better explain its cancer evaluation.

That revisit still hasn't landed. As of this writing, EPA has not issued a replacement finding, and its own ingredient page continues to carry the same "not likely" language the Ninth Circuit found unsupported, without the fuller explanation the agency said in 2022 it would provide. So the honest, current status is this: EPA's most recent formal cancer conclusion on glyphosate was sent back by a federal court for insufficient support, and neither IARC's classification nor a finalized replacement EPA conclusion has changed since 2022. Anyone telling you EPA has "cleared" glyphosate, and anyone telling you a court found it causes cancer, is misreading the same record in opposite directions.

Glyphosate shows up in oat products largely through a practice called pre-harvest desiccation, spraying a crop shortly before harvest to dry it evenly for a cleaner, more predictable harvest, especially useful in wetter climates. Applied that late in the growing cycle, residue can remain on the mature grain. The current EPA tolerance covering oats is 30 parts per million, set under the "Grain, cereal, group 15" category in 40 CFR §180.364.

On residue testing, there's a real data gap worth stating plainly rather than papering over. USDA's Pesticide Data Program, the government's own residue-testing record, has not tested oats in any of its most recent published annual summaries; its grain testing in recent cycles has covered corn and soybeans, not oats. That means there is currently no primary federal residue dataset showing what glyphosate levels actually look like in American oat products on the shelf, only the legal ceiling of 30 ppm. When the government hasn't tested a crop recently, the honest answer is that current federal residue data is limited, not that the food is clean or that it's contaminated.

One documented, verifiable lever does exist for a shopper who wants one: USDA Organic certification prohibits synthetic glyphosate on certified crops, so certified organic oats aren't directly sprayed with it, though trace drift from neighboring conventional fields remains possible. That's a certification standard, not a residue guarantee.

This is the live disagreement PurityIQ is built to show honestly rather than resolve for you: IARC's 2015 hazard classification and EPA's contested "not likely" risk finding, the court ruling that sent EPA's own conclusion back for more evidence, the tolerance EPA has been formally petitioned to cut and hasn't ruled on, and the residue-testing gap on oats specifically, each cited to its source. No score standing in for a question two federal bodies, and a federal court, haven't finished answering.

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As of August 21, 2026.

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