Open Letter to the Secretary of Health and Human Services
- Claudia Starkey
- Jan 11
- 3 min read
Dear Secretary Kennedy,
We are writing to urge immediate federal leadership on a preventable and largely overlooked public health crisis: the widespread use of cosmetic pesticides in American neighborhoods.
Across the United States, tens of millions of pounds of pesticides are applied each year not to grow food or control serious infestations, but to maintain the appearance of lawns, parks, school grounds, and residential landscapes. Per acre, suburban and urban lawns receive pesticide applications that rival or exceed those used in agriculture, despite providing no essential benefit to public health or food security.
The problem is not just what we're spraying, but where. Children play on treated grass. They breathe air affected by spray drift. They track residues indoors on shoes and pets. Families living next door have no choice, no notice, and no escape. These exposures are involuntary, unavoidable, and ongoing, woven into the fabric of everyday American life.
Many commonly used lawn and landscape pesticides are linked in peer-reviewed research to serious health harms: increased cancer risk, endocrine disruption, neurodevelopmental damage, asthma exacerbation, and immune dysfunction. The risks fall most heavily on children, pregnant individuals, and those with chronic illness or chemical sensitivity (populations the Department of Health and Human Services is explicitly charged with protecting).
Yet under current policy, virtually anyone can purchase and apply large quantities of potent herbicides and insecticides with minimal training, oversight, or accountability. These products sit on retail shelves beside garden hoses and birdseed, marketed as routine consumer goods. The result is contamination of soil, air, groundwater, and shared community spaces, often without the knowledge or consent of neighboring families.
Regulation alone is insufficient while these chemicals remain normalized and widely sold. As long as toxic lawn pesticides are treated as ordinary household products, their use will continue to undermine public health at scale. Preventing harm requires addressing both use and availability.
Other jurisdictions have proven this is achievable. Provinces across Canada have successfully restricted or banned cosmetic pesticide use, leading to measurable reductions in environmental contamination without compromising functional land care. These policies demonstrate that protecting public health does not require sacrificing green spaces, only rethinking how we manage them.
We respectfully call on the Department of Health and Human Services to:
1. Publicly recognize cosmetic pesticide exposure as a preventable public health issue, particularly for children and vulnerable populations, and issue clear guidance to that effect.
2. Support state and municipal bans on non-essential cosmetic pesticide use in residential areas, schools, parks, and public spaces through model policy frameworks and public health leadership.
3. Encourage interagency coordination with the EPA, USDA, and CDC to prioritize the reduction of unnecessary pesticide exposure as a cross-cutting health objective.
4. Support retail accountability measures that remove the most harmful cosmetic lawn pesticides from store shelves and accelerate the transition to safer alternatives.
This is not a call to ban all pesticide use. It is a call to end unnecessary, aesthetic-driven chemical exposure in the very places where families live, children play, and communities gather.
The American neighborhood should not be a chemical exposure zone by default. We cannot improve children's health through better nutrition or medical care while simultaneously allowing their everyday environments to be saturated with avoidable toxins. Public health cannot advance while toxic lawn culture remains the norm.
We urge HHS to lead with clarity and courage on this issue. The science exists. The policy models exist. Families across the country are ready for change. What is needed now is decisive federal leadership to make that change possible.
Respectfully,
Planet Health Project
On behalf of the undersigned concerned parents, health professionals, and community advocates across the United States
