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us department of agriculture
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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Think Tank Launches 'One-Stop Shop' for Economic Info to Fight Trump's War on Data
"We’re collecting all data we can to assess the economy’s health in this time when the gold standard data are under attack,” said the Economic Policy Institute's senior economist.
Nov 18, 2025
Amid President Donald Trump's efforts to conceal the harmful consequences of his economic policies by hiding key data and replacing economists who tell harsh truths with partisan yes-people, a leading US think tank on Monday announced a new digital dashboard "to provide an accountability check" against attempts to manipulate and mislead the public.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) says its new data accountability dashboard "serves as a one-stop shop" for economic data as federal statistic agencies (FSAs), once the "gold standard" for information, "face historically unprecedented threats from the Trump administration to their capacity and even their independence."
"This raises the specter of a future where FSA data cannot be relied upon to honestly report whether the US economy is experiencing dysfunction," EPI said.
In a bid to circumvent this, the EPI dashboard "displays a range of data not collected or disseminated by FSAs to shed some light on the economy during the pause in government data collection during the shutdown and—even more importantly—to provide an accountability check against efforts to manipulate FSA data in the future."
The federal statistical agencies (FSAs) that produce the gold standard economic data employers/investors/job seekers/workers/policymakers rely on to assess the health of the U.S. economy face unprecedented threats.We've pulled next-best data from non-FSA sources to help keep an eye on things. 1/
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— Economic Policy Institute (@epi.org) November 18, 2025 at 7:19 AM
As EPI senior economist Elise Gould explained in a statement: “The data collected by the federal statistical agencies are an incredibly valuable public good. While there would never be a good time to squander it, the absolute worst time to degrade data quality is when the economy is facing policy shocks that threaten to cause either a recession or an uptick of inflation."
"Given this urgency, we’re collecting all data we can to assess the economy’s health in this time when the gold standard data are under attack,” she added.
Trump's attempts to hide unfavorable economic data date back to his first administration, when he blocked or delayed economic analyses on the projected impacts of his tariffs. For example, half a dozen economists at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) quit en masse in April 2019, claiming they suffered retaliation for publishing reports that shed negative light on the president's trade and taxation policies.
In a related move that year, the USDA abruptly relocated its Economic Research Service main office from Washington, DC to Kansas City, Missouri, prompting another wave of resignations. ERS publications—including reports on farm income, rural economies, and trade impacts—dropped sharply, with key analyses delayed or blocked. Critics, including former agency officials, argued that the move to Kansas City was intended to conceal negative impacts of Trump's trade policies from the public.
During Trump's second administration, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick disbanded the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC), a key body that worked under the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis to ensure that the federal government produces accurate data on economic indicators.
Trump also gutted the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Technical Advisory Committee, which had advised the Department of Labor about how economic changes can impact data collection. In August, Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, baselessly accusing her of manipulating economic data to harm him politically by publishing a jobs report showing weak employment growth.
Two weeks later, the president nominated EJ Antoni, a senior economist at the Heritage Foundation described as a "partisan bomb thrower" who helped write Project 2025, a blueprint for a far-right overhaul of the federal government, to replace McEntarfer. Antoni stunned critics with suggestions including eliminating federal monthly jobs reports, and with his overall lack of data management experience. His nomination was later withdrawn amid mounting controversy.
Additionally, the Trump administration has summarily fired dozens of independent agency leaders, required every federal agency to have a White House liaison, and required ostensibly independent agencies to submit draft regulations to the Office of Management and Budget—headed by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought—for review before publication.
As Common Dreams reported, an analysis published in September by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities detailed how the Trump administration's politicization of data, combined with funding cuts, is making it more difficult for experts to determine how the president's policies are impacting US households.
From ending tracking of the impacts of climate-driven extreme weather, to removing a study from the Department of Justice website that showed violent attacks by far-right extremists outpaced those committed by the left, to removing questions about gender identity from key crime surveys, the Trump administration's attacks on information transcend economic data.
"The assault on data, research, and facts is fundamental to Trump and his authoritarian regime," Liza Featherstone, a contributing editor at The New Republic, recently wrote. "He seems to understand that data provides the basis for arguments, and he does not want any arguments. He also understands that facts and knowledge can only be nourished and sustained by institutions and experts, so he is destroying those institutions and pink-slipping those experts."
"We must appreciate their importance and their stakes as well as he does, and remain as committed to the institutions, the data, the facts, and the experts as Trump is to their eradication," Featherstone added. "He has brought sincere zeal to their destruction, and we must bring an even greater passion to their restoration and renaissance. We will need it, as ours is the harder job."
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