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brooke rollins
Trump's Trade Deals Endanger Farmers and Our Food System
Trump's efforts to undo the previous administration’s policies set up our food system for disruption and crisis, subjecting farmers to the uncertainties of international markets and developments elsewhere.
May 16, 2025
Former presidential adviser-cum-rightwing podcaster Steve Bannon often mentions that discerning the truth of President Donald Trump's policy goals entails focusing on the signal and not the noise.
But doing so has been next to impossible when trying to figure out the rationale behind the administration's moves in agriculture, which since January have generated widespread confusion and uncertainty.
Specifically, while Trump publicly proclaims that he stands with farmers, his tariff war with China stands to rob producers of their markets. Since Trump's last term, China has already been looking to countries like Brazil for soybeans as the U.S. has proven an unreliable partner. Adding insult to injury, unexpectedly cancelling government contracts with thousands around the country early in his term placed undue stress on farmers who already have to contend with what extreme weather events throw their way.
Taken together, the bailouts along with the freshly inked U.K.-U.S. trade deal and easing of tariffs on China illustrate how the Trump administration prioritizes export agriculture as the driving force of our country's farm system.
Now, with the details of the U.K.-U.S. trade deal becoming known, the signal—that is, the truth—of the Trump administration's vision for agriculture is coming into view. To the point, not unlike how U.S. agriculture has been directed for the past few decades, it is becoming clear that this administration will prioritize exports. The problem with this vision is that, even if it generates short-term profits, it endangers our long-term national food security by dangerously further internationalizing our agricultural system.
Consider the praise that U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins heaped on the U.K.-U.S. deal that was made on May 8, singling out its supposed gains for farmers.
Following the announcement, the secretary announced a tour that she will take through the United Kingdom to tout the agreement. While details are still being hashed out, we are told of a promised $5 billion in market access for beef and ethanol.
Contrast that clear messaging—the signal—with how government contracts with farmers were frozen and made subject to administrative review, and the funding for local food programs was slashed.
The contracts were connected with the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which included resources for initiatives like those dealing with soil and water conservation, and supporting local food processing. Additionally, programs that connected local producers with schools and food banks, for example, the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, had their funding cut in the amount of about $1 billion.
Since February, some of the contracts have been unfrozen if they aligned with the administration's political objectives (i.e. not promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI). Despite court orders ruling that all contracts must be honored, if and when the funds will be distributed, remains to be seen.
Overall, the noise surrounding the unfolding contract drama signals to farmers who want to diversify their operations and serve local markets that they should second guess looking to the government for help.
At the same time, Trump has not abandoned all producers.
In fact, amid the commotion about freezing some contracts, Secretary Rollins ok'd billions in direct payments, or bailouts, for growers of commodity crops such as corn. Thanks to such payments and not any improvements to markets, it is expected that farmers will see their incomes increase when comparing this year with the last.
Taken together, the bailouts along with the freshly inked U.K.-U.S. trade deal and easing of tariffs on China illustrate how the Trump administration prioritizes export agriculture as the driving force of our country's farm system.
Such dynamics smack of contradiction, as Trump appears eager to send our food abroad while he's willing to do whatever to bring manufacturing back to America's shores in the name of strengthening the national economy.
Still, the deeper problem is with how export promotion makes our food system insecure, subjecting farmers to international political upheavals and economic disruption.
Remember the 1970s, when a grain production crisis prompted sudden demand in the Soviet Union. Then-Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told farmers to "plant fence row to fence row" and "get big or get out" to profit from the newfound export opportunity.
The promise of international markets came—and went. President Jimmy Carter's embargo of grain exports to the Soviet Union in 1980 for that country's invasion of Afghanistan came as a body blow to the farmers who made commodity exports central to their financial plans. Farmers then struggled to pay off the debt for the land and machinery that they acquired just a few years before, which, with rising gas prices, contributed to the 1980s farm crisis. Parallels abound now, including the initial effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine increasing fertilizer and gasoline costs, and most recently, the ongoing dynamics of Trump's trade war with China.
Concerning the U.K.-U.S. deal, U.K. imports of ethanol may seem a boon for corn growers. But without future terms of the deal becoming clear, it is unclear if this is simply a continuation of what the British already import. Similarly, the significance of the slated $250 million in purchases of beef products is of questionable importance, as last year the U.S. exported $1.6 billion to China. Regardless of the recent 90 day truce in the China-U.S. trade dispute, the remaining 30% tariff would still hurt American farmers. The Trump administration's export push will find farmers without markets and in need of more bailouts.
Besides subjecting U.S. farmers' livelihoods to international uncertainty, the other concern is the lack of concern for the next generation of food producers. Year after year, the country's farmers are getting older, with no one stepping up to replace them. According to the 2022 Agricultural Census, the average farmer is over 58 years old, up over half a year from when the last census was conducted in 2017. During that same time, we lost nearly 150,000 operations. Since 2012, over 200,000 farmers have left the industry, representing a 10% decline. Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, upwards of 70% of farmland is expected to change hands over the next 20 years.
Export promotion serves a temporary fix, but places farmers at the whims of international politics. Moreover, it threatens our country's already economically pressed farmers, making our country even more dependent on a dwindling number of people for our food, as well as imports. In fact, since 2004, while exports have nearly doubled from $50 billion to $200, our food imports have increased slightly more so.
Trump's efforts to undo the previous administration's policies set up our food system for disruption and crisis, subjecting farmers to the uncertainties of international markets and developments elsewhere. If there is a signal with the noise that Trump is making with our food system, then this is it—farmers better get ready for a volatile next few years and more bailouts, as operations will continue to go under. Overall, Trump's nationalist rhetoric amounts to little, as our food system becomes more global, increasingly made vulnerable to dynamics outside our control.
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Trump Cabinet Members Regurgitate Lies About Work Requirements
"Washington politicians are ignoring clear data and forcing reporting requirements on working Americans as a cynical ploy to kick working people off their healthcare."
May 14, 2025
Top Trump administration officials took to the pages of The New York Times on Wednesday to champion the idea of work requirements as Republican lawmakers attempt to impose such mandates on recipients of Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance—an effort that could result in millions losing benefits.
The new op-ed was authored by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner.
The Cabinet members endorsed "efforts to require able-bodied adults (defined as adults who have not been certified as physically or mentally unfit to work), with some exceptions, to get jobs" and urged Congress to "enact common-sense reforms into law."
Alarmingly, the Trump administration officials pointed to Clinton-era welfare reform as a model for "successful" policy change. They neglect to mention that extreme poverty more than doubled in the wake of the 1996 overhaul.
"The good news is that history shows us that work requirements work," the officials wrote.
Research and state-level experiments with work requirements belie that claim. Journalist Bryce Covert noted in response to the administration officials' op-ed that "there have been many, many studies on the impacts of work requirements—both in the 90s and today—and the clear consensus is that they deprive people of benefits without increasing employment."
Kennedy's net worth: $15 million. Oz's net worth: $315 million. Telling the poor they have to work harder for food, housing, and healthcare. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/o...
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— Bryce Covert (@brycecovert.bsky.social) May 14, 2025 at 8:45 AM
One study of Arkansas' brief implementation of Medicaid work requirements during the first Trump administration found "no evidence that the policy succeeded in its stated goal of promoting work and instead found substantial evidence of harm to healthcare coverage and access."
A recent review of the literature on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) work requirements similarly concluded that "the best evidence shows they do not increase employment."
That didn't stop congressional Republicans from making work requirements a centerpiece of their proposed cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. The GOP's proposed work requirements for Medicaid recipients—most of whom already work if they are able to—account for over $300 billion of the bill's projected spending cuts to the program over the next decade.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) said Tuesday that the Republican plans for SNAP and Medicaid would put millions of people at risk of losing benefits, in large part due to the administrative red tape that work requirements and reporting mandates inevitably bring.
The group cited research showing that "many people who lose SNAP are working or should have qualified for an exemption, but the bureaucratic red tape made documenting their employment or proving their exemption too difficult."
On Wednesday, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) released a report examining the impacts of Medicaid work requirements in Arkansas and Georgia.
"These two case studies are a cautionary tale," the report found. "They show that work reporting requirements are not effective. Instead of getting more people working, they simply kick people off their healthcare, many of whom were already working full-time."
In a statement, Warnock said research "shows that the best way to create jobs and grow the economy is to remove bureaucratic red tape that keeps working people from accessing healthcare."
"Instead, Washington politicians are ignoring clear data and forcing reporting requirements on working Americans as a cynical ploy to kick working people off their healthcare," said Warnock. "All of this so they can fund a tax cut for the ultra-wealthy."
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Trump Keeps Declaring Fake Emergencies That Make Our Real Emergency Worse
Pre-Trump, there was one true emergency on our planet—its rapid heating. Now of course there’s another—the implosion of economies.
Apr 09, 2025
We are living through a week unlike any other in my lifetime; maybe the last truly comparable stretch was the bank closure that marked the start of the FDR administration, but then the president was there to tell Americans they had nothing to fear; now we have a president who can only insist we “take our medicine.” He is constantly hyping the fear, and he is doing it with the constant invocation of a word—”emergency”—designed to send us into ever-deeper panic.
So I’ve been doing my best to think as calmly about that word as I can, with the hope that it will offer at least a bit of mental pathway through this horror and perhaps point toward the exit.
Let’s start with one of the less-noticed executive orders of the past week—by no means the most important, though if it is carried out it will probably affect more square miles of the U.S. than any other. This is a memorandum from Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture and hence the overseer of America’s vast National Forests. In it she declares “an emergency situation on America’s National Forest system lands.”
This emergency on our national forests, in the administration’s view, is
due to uncharacteristically severe wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, invasive species, and other stressors whose impacts have been compounded by too little active management.
For example: • The 2023 Wildfire Hazard Potential for the Unites States report identifies 66,940,000 acres of NFS lands under a very high or high fire risk.
• Roughly 78,800,000 acres of NFS lands are already experiencing, or are at risk of experiencing, insect and disease infestations.
As a result, the Forest Service is commanded to dramatically increase the amount of logging on these forests, exempting them from the longstanding system of oversight and challenge from communities and tribes affected by logging. Forest supervisors have been told to increase the volume of timber offered for sale on our lands by at least 25%.
Now, as many of us have been patiently explaining for years, the biggest cause of increased fire on our forests is the dramatic increase in global temperatures that has extended fire season in California virtually year-round, and for extra months on either end across the West. The biggest infestation of insects has come from pine bark beetles, and that is directly tied to a fast-warming climate. As Cheryl Katz explained almost a decade ago:
Bark beetles are a natural part of the conifer forest life cycle, regularly flaring and fading like fireworks. But the scope and intensity in the past two decades is anything but normal, scientists say, in large part because rising temperatures are preventing the widespread winter die-off of beetle larvae, while also enhancing the beetles’ killing power. Not only are the insects expanding into new territory, they’re also hatching earlier and reproducing more frequently. New infestations become full-blown with astonishing speed, and the sheer numbers of beetles exceeds anything forest experts have seen before. [One expert] says he’s seen spruce beetle epidemics in Utah so intense that when the insects had killed all the trees, they began attacking telephone poles.
To the extent that forests needed thinning to reduce wildfire risk (and it’s not at all clear that it does), the Biden administration worked to get the effort underway, spending $4 billion on the work—in some areas they were ahead of schedule, and in others behind, but overall
“the scale of spending is unprecedented,” said Courtney Schultz with Colorado State University. The forest policy expert said millions of acres had been through environmental review and were ready for work.
“If we really want to go big across the landscape—to reduce fuels enough to affect fire behavior and have some impact on communities—we need to be planning large projects,” she said.
Where the work was lagging, it was largely the result of a lack of bodies—something that will be considerably harder now that the Forest Service has laid off 3,400 workers. But at any rate, the new logging mandated under the “emergency declaration” isn’t the careful thinning work that might reduce fire intensity—instead, the forest industry is getting access to what it really wants, large stands of big trees. It is, in other words, a money grab by vested interests that supported Trump’s campaign.
That new cutting will make climate change worse, because as we now understand that letting mature forests continue to grow is the best way to sequester carbon. Meanwhile, cutting down those forests will mean far fewer trees to hold back the increasing downpours that climate change is producing. (A new study released yesterday showed that even in areas of the West where climate change is drying out forests and increasing blazes, there’s also a big jump in deluges—what one expert called an “eye-popping.”) I remember sitting down with the chief of the Forest Service under former President Bill Clinton, almost three decades ago, and even then he said the service’s internal data showed the greatest dollar value of the forestlands was water retention, not timber.
So, to summarize: We’ve invented an emergency where none exists. (The only thing even resembling an emergency in timber supply will come if we continue to tariff Canadian producers). We’ve abandoned most of the slow and patient work to deal with a problem, and replaced it with a boondoggle designed to increase short-term profits for Trump donors. That will juice the one actual emergency we do face worse—the rapid increase in global temperature—and it will make the effects of that emergency harder to deal with.
I’d submit that the “emergency” that Trump is actually responding to—the one that motivated his Big Oil donors to donate half a billion dollars in the last election cycle—is the rapid increase in renewable energy deployment.
This pattern more or less holds across the board. Each “emergency” we’re supposedly dealing with is, at worst, a long-term problem that needs serious and patient work, work that had begun in earnest under the Biden administration. Fentanyl deaths and illegal border-crossings—which if you can remember back three weeks ago were the original “emergency” justifying tariffs on Canada and Mexico—had both been falling sharply in the last year. The “emergency” justifying tariffing every country on Earth and also the penguins was the exact opposite of an emergency: a 50-year hollowing out of industrial areas, which again had begun to reverse because of the Inflation Reduction Act—specifically targeted by the Trump administration for reversal. As The Washington Postpointed out this week, a “stunning number” of battery and EV factories have been canceled in the last month, most of them in red states.
According to data from Atlas Public Policy, a policy research group, more projects were canceled in the first quarter of 2025 than in the previous two years combined. Those cancellations include a $1 billion factory in Georgia that would have made thermal barriers for batteries and a $1.2 billion lithium-ion battery factory in Arizona.
“It’s hard at the moment to be a manufacturer in the U.S. given uncertainties on tariffs, tax credits, and regulations,” said Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas Public Policy. Hundreds of millions of dollars in additional investments appear to be stalled, he added, but haven’t been formally canceled yet.
“It’s working-class people in places like Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Michigan, and Arizona that have seen some of these projects get canceled,” Keefe said. “And I can tell you who’s benefiting—China and other countries that are doubling down.”
I said before that there was one true emergency on our planet—its rapid heating. Now of course there’s another—the implosion of economies, likely to lead (if history is its usual guide) to military conflict. But I’d submit that the “emergency” that Trump is actually responding to—the one that motivated his Big Oil donors to donate half a billion dollars in the last election cycle—is the rapid increase in renewable energy deployment.
Reutersreported over the weekend that, for the first time in American history, less than half of electricity generated in March came from fossil fuels: “More power was instead generated using renewable sources such as wind and solar, which in March reached an all-time high of 83 terawatt hours.” It’s wonderful news, of course, heralding the chance at a new world. But that’s the crisis that Big Oil faces, and to fight it they’ve been willing to drag us all down.
It’s small comfort that the man they picked to do that job, Donald Trump, is so stupid that in the process of wrecking the American economy he’s actually putting big pressure on the oil industry too. He’s doing his best: Alone among industries, fossil fuel was exempted from tariffs, in what The Guardiancalled “a clear sign of the president’s fealty to his big oil donors over the American people,” and yesterday he commanded the Department of Justice to try and stop states from suing the oil industry or enforcing the Climate Superfund laws that charge Exxon et al. for the bridges and roads that taxpayers must constantly rebuild. (Trump comically called these efforts “extortion,” even as he attempts to blackmail every country on Earth, plus of course the penguins, with his tariffs). Trump’s even trying to boost coal this week, even though the data shows that 99% of the time it would be cheaper to build new renewables.
But the damage he’s doing to the world economy threatens to spill over to the oil industry—as the price of a barrel plummets, the chances of drilling new wells plummets too. According to the Times yesterday, Harold Hamm—Trump’s industry bundler—was wondering how to explain to the president that “when you get down to that $50 oil that you talked about, then you’re below the point that you’re going to drill, baby, drill.” Fossil fuel stocks have fallen sharply. Ha ha.
But in reality there’s one immediate and overwhelming emergency. It’s name is TrumpMuskVance, and it’s threatening to engulf almost everything in its unholy flames. People—even a few senators (thank you Cory Booker)—have begun pulling the alarms, and the volunteer fire company has begun to respond (such thanks to all who came out for the Hands Off rallies this weekend). We’re going to need quick wits, courage, incredibly hard work, and some real luck to put out this moronic inferno—but that’s the job of being a citizen in 2025. You matter as a political actor, more than any of us ever have before; I’ll make sure you know of the opportunities to put your talents to use!
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