USDA Chief Brooke Rollins is feeling pretty good about her first 50 days as President Donald Trump’s secretary of agriculture.
The Texas native, who just celebrated her 53rd birthday on April 10, is proud of what her team at USDA has accomplished since taking the reins from former Secretary of Agriculture and Iowa attorney Tom Vilsack.
But despite that progress, her list of issues to tackle soon is quickly filling up. Among those action items is deciding if American farmers will need another round of assistance payments later this year and if USDA headquarters should be relocated.
If Trump’s tariff plan proves successful, Rollins says we’ll be “shipping and selling more of our row crops than ever before.”
In that case, she doesn’t anticipate needing to sign off on additional USDA assistance payments for farmers later this summer. But there’s also a potential worst-case scenario where the agency may need to provide direct farmer aid, which also happened in 2019 during tariff disruption.
Rollins hopes to soon have answers to the rumor that USDA headquarters are being relocated. With more than 106,000 employees across 29 divisions, she says USDA is a “mammoth agency” and alluded that the agency may be better positioned to serve America’s farmers and ranchers in a location closer to the major crop and livestock producing areas of the country.
“Does it make sense for one of the bigger divisions to be in Washington, D.C.? Maybe not,” she says. “So, how do we get the government closer to the people we serve? That is one of the President’s key visions in realigning the entire government and returning the power to the people – by ensuring we have the right governance structure in place, and we’re not strangling the very people we’re trying to help with more regulation and more bureaucrats.”
Rollins also expects some reductions in the USDA workforce could be coming as the Trump administration and the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) set out to “realign USDA around farmers, ranchers, foresters and ag producers first.”
Of course, the issue most farmers have top of mind today, besides low commodity prices and high interest rates, is the ongoing tariff saga.
Rollins says she can’t promise anything on that front yet, but she is confident President Trump’s negotiating chops will be able to finagle the best deal possible. Her USDA onboarding agenda included a deep dive into the global ag economy and tariffs – lessons that have proven rather enlightening for the former D.C. think-tank policy director.
“I’ll tell you what I understand now, and I’ve studied the numbers, the non-tariff barriers and what these other countries have done – not just to all American imports, but specifically to our farmers and our ranchers,” she says. “I’ve heard the President say multiple times just in the last few days how it’s unbelievable what these other countries have gotten away with for decades. And that’s what he’s changing (with tariffs).”
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