On June 25, 2025, ten environmental and farmworker advocacy organizations, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, the Pesticide Action Network North Americas (“PANNA”) and the United Farmworker Foundation, filed a writ of mandamus action in the U.S. Cout of Appeals for the 9^th Circuit.[1] The plaintiffs seek to compel the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) to issue a decision on a Petition filed by plaintiffs in 2022 which seeks greater limitations on the use of various organophosphate (“OP”) insecticides.

            The Petition names twelve ingredients as the OP products of concern.[2] EPA has recognized that the OP ingredients present a high risk of acute poisoning due to the decrease in cholinesterase when humans are exposed and the resultant impacts on the nervous system. There is also a growing body of data that indicates the OP products can have long term impacts on children who are exposed in utero.

            The Petition seeks to have  EPA (1) end all OP uses that EPA cannot find safe in food, drinking water, and spray drift; and (2) end all uses or put mitigation in place to protect workers and communities from unreasonable adverse OP risks. The Petition also asks EPA to develop a safety level that will protect children from neurodevelopmental harm, but not to delay protecting people from demonstrated harms using an acute poisoning endpoint while it does so. In addition, the Petition urges EPA to impose needed public health protections before it completes other legal obligations, which would take additional time.

            EPA had published a request for public comment on the  Petition on July 12, 2022.[3] Between 2015  and 2020 EPA completed preliminary risk assessments for eleven of the twelve ingredients, and had implemented various protective measures, but it had not made significant progress toward meeting the 2022 deadline for completing registration review. In 2022 Congress extended that deadline. EPA current projections are to completer registration review for three products by the end of 2025, seven products by the end of 2026 and two in 2027.  It was this extended schedule that prompted the filing of the writ.     

            Writs of Mandamus are rare and exceedingly difficult to obtain. Courts are reluctant to impose deadlines on agencies that are not reflected in statutes. EPA can be expected to argue that its limited resources will not allow it to complete the registration reviews sooner than scheduled. The Court may well sympathize with EPA give the resource strain it is under although the 9^thCircuit has previously imposed deadlines on EPA. It remains to be seen whether the passage of three years since the filing of the Petition and EPA’s extended schedule for completing the registration review of these products is sufficiently elongated so as to prompt the Court to order faster action. If the Court is inclined the next step would be to require EPA to decide the Petition within a certain time frame. If EPA denies the Petition the matter will be right back in the 9^th Circuit.

[1] Case 25-3955; U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9^th Circuit

[2] The ingredients are Acephate; Bensulide; Chlorethoxyfos; Diazinon; Dichlorvos/DDVP; Dimethoate Ethoprop; Malathion; Phosmet; Terbufos; Tribufos

[3] 87 Fed. Reg. 41310 (July 12, 2022.)