President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Brooke Rollins to lead the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in his administration.
“Brooke’s commitment to support the American Farmer, defense of American Food Self-Sufficiency, and the restoration of Agriculture-dependent American Small Towns is second to none,” Trump said in a statement announcing the nomination on Nov. 23.
Rollins grew up in a farming family in Glen Rose, Texas. She participated in Future Farmers of America and 4H. She studied agriculture development at Texas A&M University.
Rollins previously worked on Trump’s 2016 Economic Advisory Council. She went on to serve in his first administration as director of the Domestic Policy Council, director of Trump’s Office of American Innovation, and as his assistant for strategic initiatives.
After Trump’s first term, Rollins went on to become the president and CEO of the America First Policy Institute.
“As our next Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke will spearhead the effort to protect American Farmers, who are truly the backbone of our Country,” Trump said.
Rollins thanked Trump for the nomination in a post on her X social media profile on Saturday.
“It will be the honor of my life to fight for America’s farmers and our Nation’s agricultural communities,” she wrote.
The USDA is currently led by Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa who occupied the same position during the Obama administration.
The agency has 100,000 employees and a $25 billion proposed budget for fiscal year 2025.
USDA May Be Key to Healthy Objective
A USDA webpage states that the agency “provide[s] leadership on food, agriculture, natural resources, rural development, nutrition, and related issues based on public policy, the best available science, and effective management.”The agency has responsibilities ranging from food safety and agricultural export policy to animal welfare and nutrition labeling.
Through the U.S. Forest Service, it also controls more than 193 million acres of land, about a quarter of the land under the authority of the federal government. In addition, USDA oversees the federal government’s crop insurance program. It also includes the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the federal hub for research related to agriculture, as well as the Foreign Agricultural Service.
Trump’s concern with the United States’ agricultural trade deficit could impact the USDA, given the Foreign Agricultural Service’s critical role in that area. The president-elect’s Agenda47 also touches on the link between diet and chronic illness, suggesting that nutritional policy or other matters related to farming and the food supply may be up for debate.
The USDA is anticipated to work with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr on his Make America Healthy Again initiative, after he was named as Health and Human Services Secretary.
“USDA, unfortunately, has been captured by the big agricultural interests,” Kennedy said in a 2023 video.
Farm Bill Looms
The USDA’s pending $25.1 billion budget request is $2.2 billion more, or 8.7 percent higher, than its spending plan from the previous fiscal year.The department’s annual funding requests are folded into the five-year Farm Bill, a massive omnibus often described as the federal government’s most complex, confusing budget.
The current five-year Farm Bill that Trump signed in 2018 was extended for a year in November 2023. It expired in September, while certain programs have a final expiration date at the end of December.
Convincing Congress to quickly adopt a five-year Farm Bill will be the new secretary’s most pressing objective. Lawmakers representing agricultural states would likely agree.
At a Trump campaign event in Wisconsin just ahead of Election Day, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) told The Epoch Times that the bill would be his top priority if reelected.
“We have until January 1 to get something done, or our agriculture industry is going to take the biggest punch to the face it’s ever taken,” he said.
Farm bills authorize only mandatory funding based on multiyear estimates as baselines for annual allocations. Those pieces of legislation don’t include discretionary spending.
According to USDA’s 125-page fiscal year 2025 budget summary, its actual per-annum request is $213.3 billion, with mandatory Farm Bill programs pegged at $181.7 billion and $31.6 billion in discretionary funding. That’s a 6.84-percent increase, or $2.16 billion, above the fiscal 2024 level.
The stymied Farm Bill, adopted in 2024 by the House but never heard in the Senate, outlines $1.46 trillion in spending over the next 10 years, earmarking an average of $22.5 billion in annual discretionary spending, $3 billion less than the 2018 Farm Bill authorized, and $9 billion less than USDA’s request for fiscal 2025.
Rollins must also address labor costs that small, family-owned farms say are driving them out of business, and stem the accelerating loss of farmlands to development.
There are 544,000 fewer farms in the United States than there were in 1980 and more than 151 million acres formerly tilled are no longer producing commercial crops, according to the USDA.
Other issues that will confront the new secretary of agriculture include contention over “reference prices” to assist farmers when market prices fall below a target level, USDA’s management of the Commodity Credit Corporation, and whether to permanently enroll one-time conservation funding from 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act into the Fam Bill.
