President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday nominated Brooke Rollins to lead the Department of Agriculture.
A policy adviser to Trump during his first term in office, Rollins is the president of the American First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank she co-founded in 2021 that has proposed plans for the president-elect’s second and final term in the White House.
“Brooke was on my 2016 Economic Advisory Council, and did an incredible job during my First Term as the Director of the Domestic Policy Council, Director of the Office of American Innovation, and Assistant to the President for Strategic Initiatives,” Trump said in a statement Saturday. “In these roles, she helped develop and manage the transformational Domestic Policy Agenda of my Administration.”
Trump also praised her for her work with the America First Policy Institute and America First Works, “building a team of loyal Patriots, and championing the Policies of our America First Agenda.”
Between 2020 and 2021, Rollins was Trump’s director of the domestic policy council and assistant to the president for strategic initiatives.
The president-elect’s announcement confirming Rollins’s nomination follows speculation he would tap her as his White House chief of staff. Meanwhile, former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who served on the Senate Agriculture Committee during her time in Congress, was also widely rumored to be the next USDA secretary.
Rollins’s appointment follows Trump’s move earlier this week to nominate her friend, Linda McMahon for education secretary. McMahon is the chair of the AFPI. In a flurry of Cabinet picks Friday evening, the president-elect also selected former Texas state Rep. Scott Turner, who is AFPI’s chairman of the Center for Education Opportunity, to serve as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Combined with at least two other former Trump administration officials affiliated with AFPI, Michael Rigas and Doug Hoelscher, who are working directly with the transition, Rollins’s nomination appears to cement the influence the conservative think tank will wield over the incoming administration.
If confirmed, Rollins would likely work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to lead the Departments of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has promised to overhaul the department’s guidelines on nutrition and root out conflicts of interest in an effort to end the chronic disease epidemic.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Kennedy has said that the “food industry lobbied to make sure that nearly all agricultural subsidies go to the commodity crops that are the feedstock of the processed food industry,” and denounced the current health guidelines and health agencies for setting policies that “are destroying small farms and our soil.”
“We will stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies. We will get the toxic chemicals out of our food. We will reform the entire food system,” the HHS nominee promised in August when he suspended his presidential campaign to endorse Trump.
