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brooke rollins
Skeptics Warn of Greenwashing as Trump Admin Launches Regenerative Agriculture Pilot
One campaigner emphasized that the administration "continues to cut conservation staff, support the pesticide industry, roll back environmental laws, and play trade war games."
Dec 10, 2025
The announcement of the US Department of Agriculture's $700 million Farmers First Regenerative Agriculture Pilot was met with some skepticism on Wednesday, given other recent moves that conflict with the Trump administration's promises to "Make America Healthy Again."
Regenerative agriculture is an approach to farming and ranching that goes beyond sustainability, aiming to improve soil, water, and air quality; boost biodiversity; produce nutrient-dense food; and even help mitigate the climate emergency by storing carbon. Its practices include agroforestry, conservation buffers, cover cropping, holistically managed grazing, limiting pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, and no-till farming.
US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced the pilot alongside Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the controversial man behind the MAHA movement. She said that "we will deliver this support through existing programs our farmers already know and already trust."
Angela Huffman, president and co-founder of the group Farm Action, a longtime advocate of regenerative farming, welcomed the pilot, noting that "done right, this investment will help farmers lower their input costs, break free from the export-driven commodity overproduction treadmill, and move toward healthier, more resilient, and more profitable farming systems."
Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, was far more critical of the initiative, warning that "farmers trying to do the right thing for our environment need all the support they can get, but without clear standards, this ill-defined pilot program isn't enough."
"Regenerative agriculture needs to be more than just buzzwords Big Ag uses to greenwash business as usual," said Feldstein. "While the Trump administration promises money for sustainable practices, it continues to cut conservation staff, support the pesticide industry, roll back environmental laws, and play trade war games that hurt farmers and our food system."
As Spectrum News reported Wednesday:
The USDA regenerative agriculture pilot program flows from a Make America Healthy Again Commission report released in September that included more than 120 initiatives to address chronic childhood disease. One of the report's key focus areas was to remove harmful chemicals from the food supply.
On Wednesday, Kennedy said the report promised farmers an "off ramp" to transition away from chemical fertilizers "to a model that emphasizes soil health, and with soil health comes nutrient density... and a transition to a much healthier America for our children."
When the second MAHA report was released in September, some environmental and public health advocates blasted the commission for echoing "the pesticide industry's talking points," while Alexandra Dunn, CEO of the trade group CropLife America, celebrated that "we were heard" by the Trump administration.
The administration has also come under fire for constantly serving the fossil fuel industry; installing an ex-lobbyist, Kyle Kunkler, in a key role at the Environmental Protection Agency and nominating another, Douglas Troutman, for an EPA post; embracing herbicides including atrazine and dicamba as well as "forver chemical" pesticides; and urging the US Supreme Court to shield Bayer, which bought Monsanto, from lawsuits alleging that glyphosate-based Roundup causes cancer.
As Sarah Starman, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, highlighted Wednesday, the Trump administration has also been criticized for cutting billions of dollars in funding previously allocated to promoting regenerative agriculture and firing staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
The pilot, Starman said, "is a step in the right direction, and we applaud the intent. But it will only be effective if USDA reverses the past year of massive cuts to on-the-ground conservation staff. Regenerative agriculture requires whole-farm, science-based planning, and right now the agency lacks the army of specialists needed to help farmers design and implement those plans."
"In addition, phasing out harmful agrochemicals—the synthetic pesticides and fertilizers that harm human health and degrade soil health—must be at the center of any regenerative program," she stressed. "The new initiative's incentives for integrated pest management fall far short of what is needed to help farmers get off the pesticide treadmill and spur a transition to a truly regenerative food system."
"The initiative must be updated to include specific, measurable incentives for deep reductions in agrochemical use if it is to deliver truly healthy, resilient soils and promote human health," she added. "Finally, going forward, all major farm subsidies should carry strong conservation compliance requirements so that every public dollar supporting agriculture also supports soil health, water quality, and climate resilience on every acre."
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Trump Admin Threatens Blue State SNAP Funds Unless They Turn Over Recipient Data
"Why is the Trump administration so hellbent on people going hungry?” asked New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose state has nearly 3 million food stamp recipients.
Dec 03, 2025
The Trump administration is threatening to strip away funds used to provide food assistance to poor Americans in Democrat-led states beginning next week, unless they provide information identifying who receives benefits.
At a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said states would be denied the ability to access billions of dollars that Congress has appropriated to administer the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), unless they provide the federal government with personal information—including names, Social Security numbers, addresses, birth dates, and immigration status—of aid recipients.
SNAP provides Americans with incomes below 130% of the federal poverty line with roughly $6 per day on average to pay for food. Roughly 1 in 8 Americans—over 42 million—rely on the program. Rollins originally ordered states to provide this information to the government in May in what she said was an effort to verify the eligibility of those receiving benefits.
“As of next week, we have begun and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states until they comply and they tell us and allow us to partner with them to root out this fraud and to protect the American taxpayer,” Rollins said Tuesday.
As of Tuesday, 29 states had provided the information, but many Democratic ones, including New York and California, had not. Rollins claimed that those states were choosing to "protect illegals, criminals, and bad actors over the American taxpayer.”
While the benefits paid to individuals would not be cut, states that don't comply stand to lose millions of dollars that they use to administer the program, which could delay benefits and force them to push some recipients off the program.
In its efforts to enact sweeping cuts to social safety net programs like SNAP, Medicaid, and Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies, the Trump administration has often fallen back on false claims that the services are being abused by ineligible people, including undocumented immigrants.
"Undocumented immigrants are not eligible to receive federal benefits under [SNAP]," explained Melissa Cruz of the American Immigration Council in November. "However, SNAP benefits are provided to households rather than individuals. If, for example, the head of a household is undocumented, they may still apply for SNAP benefits for their U.S. citizen children. But benefits are calculated based on the number of eligible people in the household, so the assistance would only cover the US citizen children—not the entire household.”
Rollins has elsewhere claimed that 186,000 deceased individuals receive benefits, while 500,000 individuals receive duplicate benefits, citing it as evidence of fraud. But as the current US Department of Agriculture website explains, these are the result of administrative efforts—such as states being slow to update eligibility rolls when recipients die or move to a new state. The USDA says that over the past 15 years, it has reduced the prevalence of illegal benefit trafficking in SNAP from 4% to 1%.
The USDA's order comes on the heels of the largest cut to SNAP in the program's history. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed by Trump in July, cut funding to the program by roughly 20%.
Like with other programs, Rollins suggested on Tuesday that the goal of USDA's order was not simply to root out "fraud," but to further slash Americans' benefits: “As [former President] Joe Biden was working to buy an election a year ago, he increased food stamp program funding by 40%, so now... we continue to roll that back,” she said.
Rollins' 40% claim is also an exaggeration; according to an estimate by the Cato Institute last month, the spending increase was actually about 21%.
Like President Donald Trump's previous efforts to deny SNAP benefits to states during this fall's government shutdown, the USDA's order has run into legal hurdles.
After 22 states sued, a federal judge in San Francisco, Maxine Chesney, issued a preliminary injunction in October blocking the administration from demanding the data.
Chesney found that these actions likely violated the SNAP Act, which says that states are only allowed to release data related to administering the program. She also found that states would likely succeed in their argument that the administration might illegally share the data with other agencies, like the Department of Homeland Security, to aid mass deportation efforts.
Gina Plata-Nino, the SNAP director at the nonprofit Food Research and Action Center, told the Washington Post that the USDA's demands for this data were likely illegal.
“The federal law restricts USDA access to this,” Plata-Nino said. “The agency has always relied on anonymized data or small samples to perform oversight… Them saying, ‘We’re going to go ahead and remove this funding,’ it’s just so unprecedented.”
The Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee accused Trump and Rollins of "illegally threatening to withhold federal dollars."
"SNAP has one of the lowest fraud rates of any government program, but Trump continues to weaponize hunger," they said.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), whose state had nearly 3 million food stamp recipients as of 2024, asked why Trump was again threatening to strip the state of SNAP funding after his previous attack on the program during the shutdown.
"Genuine question: Why is the Trump administration so hellbent on people going hungry?” Hochul asked.
Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst who focuses on SNAP and other antipoverty programs at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted that while cutting funds, Trump has also scrapped the nation's most comprehensive food insecurity survey, the Household Food Security Report, which would measure the effects of those cuts on Americans.
“The Trump administration’s approach,” Bergh said, “has been enacting the deepest cuts to food assistance in history, needlessly disrupting SNAP benefits during the government shutdown, and terminating the most reliable measure of food insecurity to hide the consequences of those decisions.”
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'Don't Let Kids Go Hungry': Trump Panned Over Not Using Emergency Fund for SNAP
The Trump administration "just illegally reversed course," said Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee. "They're choosing to cut food assistance for 42 million Americans."
Oct 25, 2025
Elected Democrats and other critics on Saturday continued to call out the Trump administration for refusing to use contingency funding to pay for food stamps during the US government shutdown, imperiling hunger relief for about 42 million low-income people.
In November, Americans who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits won't get their food aid if Congress doesn't reach an agreement to fund the government, which shut down at the beginning of the month due to a battle over healthcare.
"Congress established an emergency fund to ensure that millions of Americans on SNAP continue to receive nutrition assistance when funding expires in November," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who caucuses with Democrats, said on social media Saturday.
Sanders—the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—then appealed directly to Republican President Donald Trump: "Don't let kids go hungry. Use these emergency funds to feed low-income families."
Throughout the week, left-leaning groups, congressional Democrats, and Democratic governors of states including Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, have called for using the contingency fund.
Sharon Parrott, a former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) official who is now president of the think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, took aim at US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins in a Wednesday statement.
"Secretary Rollins' claim that the Trump Administration is unable to deliver November SNAP benefits during a shutdown is unequivocally false," Parrott said. "In fact, the administration is legally required to use contingency reserves—billions of dollars that Congress provided for use when SNAP funding is inadequate that remain available during the shutdown—to fund November benefits for the 1 in 8 Americans who need SNAP to afford their grocery bill."
"Speaking as a former OMB official, I know from experience that the federal government has the authority and the tools it needs during a shutdown to get these SNAP funds to families," she continued. "It would be unconscionable for the administration to go out of its way to threaten millions of children, seniors, veterans, people with disabilities, parents, and workers with hunger, rather than taking all legal steps available to provide food assistance to people who need it."
That same day, a trio of experts at the Center for American Progress also argued that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) "is legally obligated to use" the contingency resources. They further highlighted that "the Trump administration has spent the entire year endangering the food security of millions of Americans. From terminating funding used to purchase food for schools and food banks to passing the largest cuts in SNAP history, the administration has made it clear that its goal is to take food away from hungry families—and that sentiment is extending to the USDA's approach to the shutdown."
US House Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Angie Craig (D-Minn.) and Subcommittee on Nutrition and Foreign Agriculture Ranking Member Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.), along with nearly every other Democrat in the chamber, sent a letter to Rollins on Friday. They wrote:
USDA's shutdown plan acknowledges that "congressional intent is evident that SNAP's operations should continue since the program has been provided with multiyear contingency funds." USDA still has significant funding available in SNAP's contingency reserve—which Congress provides precisely for this reason—that can be used to fund the bulk of November benefits.
We urge USDA to use these funds for November SNAP benefits and issue clear guidance to states on how to navigate benefit issuance. Additionally, while the contingency reserve will not cover November benefits in full, we urge USDA to use its statutory transfer authority or an other legal authority at its disposal to supplement these dollars and fully fund November benefits.
As Politico reported Friday, "The contingency fund for SNAP currently holds roughly $5 billion, which would not cover the full $9 billion the administration would need to fund November benefits."
"Even if the administration did partially tap those funds, it would take weeks to dole out the money on a pro rata basis—meaning most low-income Americans would miss their November food benefits anyway," the outlet explained. "In order to make the deadline, the Trump administration would have needed to start preparing for partial payments weeks ago, which it has not done."
Politico and other outlets obtained a brief memo from the USDA blaming Democrats for the disruption and claiming that "contingency funds are not legally available to cover regular benefits."
"SNAP contingency funds are only available to supplement regular monthly benefits when amounts have been appropriated for, but are insufficient to cover, benefits," the memo states. "The contingency fund is not available to support [fiscal year] 2026 regular benefits, because the appropriation for regular benefits no longer exists."
"Instead, the contingency fund is a source of funds for contingencies, such as the Disaster SNAP program, which provides food purchasing benefits for individuals in disaster areas, including natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, that can come on quickly and without notice," it continues. "For example, Hurricane Melissa is currently swirling in the Caribbean and could reach Florida."
The memo adds that "this administration will not allow Democrats to jeopardize funding for school meals and infant formula in order to prolong their shutdown."
After also obtaining the memo, CNN asked Trump if he would direct the USDA to fund SNAP next month. The president—who left for Asia later Friday—claimed, "Yeah, everybody is going to be in good shape, yep," without offering any details.
Responding to the memo on social media Saturday, Democratic members of the House Agriculture Committee said that the Trump administration "just illegally reversed course by deciding not to provide food assistance to Americans next month. They have the funding and the legal authority to provide full benefits. They chose not to use it. They're choosing to cut food assistance for 42 million Americans."
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