Overview

Background

Brooke Leslie Rollins was born on April 10, 1972, in Glen Rose, Texas, a small agricultural community, and was raised on a farm where she spent her days barrel racing and raising livestock. That rural upbringing has been central to her public identity throughout her career. She was also an active member of the Texas FFA Association in high school, serving as a state officer.

Rollins graduated with honors from Texas A&M University with a degree in agricultural development and was the first female to be elected student body president there. After earning her Juris Doctor with honors at the University of Texas School of Law, she served as Governor Rick Perry's policy director. She also worked in private law firms and clerked for U.S. Federal District Court Judge Barbara M. Lynn. She is the first Texan and the first Texas A&M alumna to hold the position of Secretary of Agriculture.

Rollins is the former president and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a free-market public policy think tank that conducted research on education, taxes, tort reform, deregulation, criminal justice, and health care policy. She led TPPF for fifteen years, elevating it from a small policy organization to a national force and redefining the possibilities for a state-based think tank. That platform served as the model for her next venture: she founded, served as president of, and led as CEO the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), which functioned as the principal think tank and policy incubator for Trump-world during the years between his two administrations.

During President Trump's first administration, she was the Director of the Domestic Policy Council and Assistant to the President for Strategic Initiatives in the White House, and also previously served as Director of the Office of American Innovation. Those roles positioned her as a central architect of Trump's domestic agenda in his first term and gave her unusual familiarity with the machinery of federal governance before returning to a cabinet role.

Public Role in the Second Trump Administration

Departmental Reorganization and Workforce Reductions

Rollins moved quickly after her confirmation to reshape USDA's priorities and staffing. The day after her confirmation, she addressed more than 400 USDA staffers and pledged to bring greater efficiency to the department, reviewing findings from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and welcoming the opportunity to optimize the USDA workforce and stop wasteful spending. Her embrace of DOGE was explicit: she invited the office's full access to USDA operations and framed its involvement as an unambiguous benefit to the department's mission.

The human cost of that reorganization has been substantial. USDA lost nearly 22,000 employees across 2025 and 2026, including roughly 36 percent of Rural Development staff. Mass firings purged scientists whose discoveries underpin modern agriculture, from seeds to soil management. Critics, including current and former USDA employees, have argued that the cuts undermined the department's operational capacity. A federal employee union president wrote to lawmakers arguing that the 2026 appropriations law explicitly prohibited reorganization activities without prior congressional notice.

Policy Direction: "More Farmer, Less Climate"

Rollins has reshaped USDA's focus around what she summarized as "more farmer, less climate," a formulation that captures her deliberate shift away from the environmental and equity priorities of the Biden era. In December 2025, she signed a Secretary's Memorandum establishing new priorities for USDA research and development activities, framed around strengthening national security, protecting U.S. agriculture, and supporting American farmers and consumers. The memo explicitly distanced USDA from Biden-era initiatives, citing what she described as misguided policies focused on DEI and environmental justice in agricultural research, extension, and education programs that diverted resources away from solving actual challenges.

Trade and Farm Economy

Trade has been one of the most complicated issues of Rollins's tenure. The Trump administration's broad tariff agenda created significant disruption in agricultural export markets, particularly with China, even as Rollins argued that the administration was rebuilding a stronger trade framework. She told Congress that the prior administration had not signed a single new trade deal in four years, contributing to what she described as a $50 billion agricultural trade deficit that the Trump team inherited.

Rollins reported to the House Agriculture Committee that the Trump administration had negotiated 19 new trade deals, which was expected to cut the agricultural trade deficit in one year by 42 percent. Specific agreements included an additional $5 billion in agricultural export opportunities with the United Kingdom, Indonesia eliminating 99 percent of previously established tariffs on U.S. exports, and Japan agreeing to increase U.S. rice imports by 75 percent and purchase over $8 billion in agricultural products. Critics noted, however, that the trade deficit remained historically elevated and that tariff-related disruptions had contributed to volatility for American producers throughout 2025.

SNAP and Food Assistance

Rollins has also been at the center of controversy over cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). More than 3.5 million Americans lost food assistance after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act took effect. A reconciliation law enacted $187 billion in SNAP cuts and shifted program costs to states, triggering a lawsuit from a coalition of Democratic-led states. That coalition's lawsuit against USDA's SNAP restrictions, filed in March 2026, remains active in federal court. Rollins has defended the changes as a necessary recalibration of a program she views as having expanded beyond its core mission.

Recent Developments

By mid-2026, Rollins was managing a convergence of simultaneous pressures. In June 2026, USDA confirmed the first domestic New World Screwworm detection in 45 years, in a three-week-old calf in La Pryor, Texas, a biosecurity emergency that critics linked directly to DOGE-related workforce reductions in the agency's Plant Protection and Quarantine program. The same DOGE-driven workforce reductions championed as fiscal discipline were being linked directly to an active biosecurity emergency.

Democrats pointed to data showing farm bankruptcy surging 46 percent nationwide in Trump's first year back in office, and an astounding 70 percent in the Midwest. Rollins disputed those characterizations and defended the administration's record on trade and input costs before the House Agriculture Committee. She committed on the record to providing the committee a 30-day trade impact analysis on retaliatory tariffs and to answering outstanding questions on the USDA reorganization from a letter signed by 47 Democratic members.

A federal lawsuit alleging illegal religious proselytizing in official communications was also launched against USDA and Rollins, adding a legal dimension to an already charged political environment. On the legislative front, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 passed the House 224–200 but left the Senate still needing to act. At Minnesota Farmfest in August 2026, Rollins announced several steps USDA was taking to support American farmers in response to ongoing challenges, including data modernization, payment flexibility, and enhanced crop insurance options.

Outlook

Rollins occupies a structurally important and politically exposed position in Trump's second term. She is both a loyal ideological ally of the president and the head of a department responsible for managing programs — farm credit, nutrition assistance, rural development, biosecurity — that affect tens of millions of Americans across partisan lines. The tension between her deregulatory ambitions and the operational demands of a department that has lost nearly a quarter of its workforce is a defining feature of her tenure.

The fate of the farm bill in the Senate, the ongoing SNAP litigation, unresolved questions about the screwworm outbreak's connection to workforce cuts, and the longer-term impact of tariff disruptions on agricultural exports all remain live issues. Whether the trade framework she has helped negotiate will translate into lasting gains for American farmers — or whether the disruption wrought by tariffs and personnel reductions will define her legacy — is a question that the remainder of Trump's second term will go some distance toward answering.