EPA Adds 60 Days to Glyphosate Comment Window, Pushing the Review Into 2027

The window on glyphosate science just got two months wider. In a notice published September 28, the Environmental Protection Agency extended public comment on its open literature search for glyphosate by 60 days, moving the deadline from September 24 to November 23, 2026. The agency said the extra time is meant "to allow for further meaningful input from stakeholders."

The document at issue is not a proposed rule or a draft risk assessment. It is the systematic review itself — the search terms, databases, screening criteria and study list EPA used to assemble the scientific record for glyphosate's human health hazard assessment, first opened for comment on August 25. Commenters are being asked to flag peer-reviewed, publicly accessible research the search may have overlooked, and to supply complete citations: author, publication date, journal and title.

That sounds procedural. In practice, it is the step that determines which studies are even in the room when EPA decides how much risk glyphosate poses to people.

The clock is officially slower

The extension lands inside docket EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361, the registration review file EPA opened in July 2009 and has been advancing in fits since — a proposed interim decision in May 2019, an extended comment period on that proposal a month later, and now a literature search meant to refresh the human health portion of the record with research published since.

September also brought a structural change. EPA and the Department of Health and Human Services signed a memorandum of understanding creating a joint technical working group to review the same science, an arrangement that pushed EPA's internal target for a completed updated human health risk assessment from late 2026 into early 2027. Working-group materials are to be posted to the same docket as they are finished. Extending the literature-search comment period is consistent with that slower pace: the agency cannot close a window it just opened wider.

Why Texas cotton cares

Glyphosate is the highest-volume herbicide sold anywhere in the world, and in Texas it functions less as one tool among many than as the spine of a weed program. In the state's cotton belt — the largest cotton acreage in the country — it carries burndown before planting, in-season weed control in tolerant systems, and pre-harvest applications that open the canopy for pickers. Corn, sorghum, wheat and soybeans across the state lean on it the same way.

The alternatives are thinner than they were a decade ago. Resistant Palmer amaranth and other pigweed species have stripped out several older chemistries across the Southern High Plains, and growers who lose glyphosate-based options face higher costs, narrower application windows and more tillage — the kind of soil-disturbing work that no-till cotton systems were built to avoid. Those consequences arrive through label changes rather than bans, and they arrive on the review's timeline, not the growing season's.

None of that is settled by a comment-period extension. But a longer window matters for the people who intend to use it: university weed scientists, grower associations, crop consultants and pesticide registrants all have a stake in which studies EPA counts. Submissions that arrive with citations attached carry more weight than objections filed without them, which is precisely what the notice asks for.

What happens next

Comments are due November 23, 2026 through the federal docket. After the record closes, EPA will fold the screened literature into its human health hazard assessment, with the joint EPA-HHS working group reviewing the same body of evidence. The stated target for completing that assessment is early 2027 — after the next Texas planting season, which means growers will head into spring without knowing whether the glyphosate label they work from today will look the same in 2028.

Registration review has already consumed roughly seventeen years on this molecule. The last three months just added sixty more days to a process that determines what Texas weeds get treated with, and how much it costs to treat them.