Brooke Rollins, the President elect’s nominee for Agriculture Secretary, is the current president of the America First Policy Institute, a group led by former Trump administration officials that spent months planning for a potential second term. A Texas native, she previously ran the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank, she had been a possible nominee for chief of staff in the incoming 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.
Robert Kennedy Jr., the nominee to run Health and Human Services, says the current system of subsidizing farmers, at more than $30 billion a year, needs to be overhauled. He wants to remove ultra-processed foods from both food-stamp benefits and school meals, and eliminate soda from food aid. Both programs are overseen by USDA, and previous efforts to do so have met resistance from the food industry, lawmakers and some anti-hunger advocacy groups.
He has also called for revisiting the standards for pesticides and other chemicals in food. He has focused in particular on glyphosate, which is widely used in growing the major U.S. commodity crops, including corn and soybeans. Rolling back the use of glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in the world and the active ingredient in weedkiller Roundup, would be a shock to the U.S.A.
We’ll have to see how these two work together for USA’s agricultural future.
