Agriculture scholarships helped pay Brooke Rollins’ way through Texas A&M University. If she becomes the next USDA secretary, she’ll have to decide whether to keep sending money to her alma mater for climate-smart farming.
Federal funding for climate change research at Texas A&M and other universities around the country is just one of the challenges she would face as the incoming administration looks to steer the 100,000-employee Department of Agriculture away from Biden administration policies.
Rollins, who’ll require Senate confirmation to serve as USDA secretary in President-elect Donald Trump’s second term, doesn’t have much of a public record on agriculture policy. But the conservative movement she’s helped lead through think tanks and as Trump’s domestic policy adviser in this first term has criticized the USDA’s climate work as going beyond the agency’s main mission.
She’ll face other thorny issues, too, from promoting biofuels against likely objections from the petroleum industry to potentially cutting agency staff to align with the new administration’s leaner approach to government.
