Brooke Rollins, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as the next secretary of the Department of Agriculture, will testify January 23 before the Senate Agriculture Committee. The panel’s confirmation hearing is a vital chance to ask her about her stance on farm subsidies, food prices and other key issues.
Texas-born Rollins is the president and CEO of the conservative think tank America First Policy Institute, or AFPI. Her previous roles include serving as policy director for Texas then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, followed by leading the Texas Public Policy Foundation, another conservative group. She also held a top domestic policy role in the first Trump administration.
If confirmed by the Senate to lead the USDA, Rollins would exert major influence on U.S. agriculture and related policies.
Here are 10 questions senators on the Agriculture Committee should ask her.
1. Will you oppose proposals that increase food prices? Experts say tariffs on food imports and the deportation of farm workers will cause food prices to rise – on top of recent price hikes – making groceries increasingly unaffordable.
2. Will you cut assistance for hungry people? The USDA recently increased the standard benefit for SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But many Republicans have proposed to reverse that increase or block future adjustments. Texas SNAP recipients currently only receive less than $6 per day.
3. Will you add new work requirements to SNAP? SNAP recipients are already required to work or seek work, but the AFPI and some Republicans have called for additional work requirements for hungry people seeking food assistance.
4. Will you require farm subsidy recipients to work? Unlike SNAP recipients, farm subsidy recipients are not required to work. Thousands of people live in cities and do not live or work on farms but still receive farm subsidies, including more than 6,000 people living in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and more than 2,200 people living near Houston.
5. Do you support unlimited farm subsidies? Unlike SNAP participants, some farm subsidy recipients are not subject to any limits on the amount they can receive, and many farmers are triple-dipping into multiple programs. At least 10,000 farmers have received payments for 39 consecutive years, including a Texas farmer who collected more than $19 million between 1985 and 2023.
6. Do you support U.S. subsidies going to foreign crop insurance companies? One-third of crop insurance subsidies flow to crop insurance companies and agents, not farmers, including foreign crop insurance companies like Chubb, Sompo, QBE Insurance Group and Zurich Insurance Group.
7. Will you help farmers prepare for extreme weather? Rollins has decried what she calls “climate change hysteria.” Even though farmers are already being harmed by extreme weather, some Republicans have proposed to cut funding for efforts that would help prepare their farms for the growing climate crisis.
8. Will you help farmers remediate soil contaminated with PFAS? Thousands of farmers, including in Texas, have used sludge as a fertilizer. But those biosolids, generated after treatment of human waste, have contaminated millions of acres of farmland with the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS.
9. Will you support efforts to ban toxic chemicals in food? Experts warn that harmful pesticides and food chemicals are being added to our food, including meat and poultry.
10. Will you support healthy school meals? New USDA standards ensure that school foods are low in sodium and sugar. But more can be done to rid school foods of toxic chemicals and make school meals available to all students.
