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Secretary Rollins Testifies Before the House Agriculture Committee on Farm Aid, Trade and USDA Reorganization

June 11, 2025 · House Committee on Agriculture · 5:12:41

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins made her first appearance before the House Agriculture Committee as the 33rd Secretary of Agriculture. The chairman welcomed her and noted Congress had provided $21 billion for weather-related losses in 2023 and 2024 and another $10 billion for sustained economic losses, that recent USDA forecasts show net farm income stabilizing for 2025, and that the committee wanted her plans to make USDA more efficient, support producers in a challenging trade environment, and address animal health risks, as he stated it.

In her testimony, Rollins listed the department’s actions, including streamlining regulations and cutting red tape for poultry farmers by extending line-speed waivers and removing duplicative data collection, and fighting what she described as lawfare against family farms such as the Ma family of South Dakota, as she stated it. She said USDA moved the emergency commodity assistance program out in record time, sending aid to more than 500,000 farmers in the last eight weeks totaling over $7.7 billion out the door to date, plus $1 billion in emergency livestock relief issued to date, and that the department is addressing waste, fraud and abuse in SNAP and all USDA programs — including a review of tens of thousands of contracts, grants, trainings and DEI programs resulting in savings of over $5.5 billion — as she stated the figures. She said she had already traveled to the United Kingdom and Italy and would soon leave for Vietnam, Japan and India and then South America to push aggressive trade deals, and she credited the one big beautiful bill with a projected $3.8 billion increase in farm income, protection of over two million family farms from the death tax and more than $10 billion in tax cuts for the agricultural community, according to her testimony.

In questioning, Rollins said California’s Proposition 12 has had an extreme impact on pork producers — the chairman cited pork prices in California up 20 percent on average since implementation and compliant-barn construction costs of at least $3,400 to $4,000 per sow, as he stated them — and Rollins said that while she believes in federalism, when state rules impact other states so negatively that is not what the founders intended, that it cannot stand, and that she fully supports the committee’s effort and is looking at department actions to mitigate the consequences, as she stated it. On farm labor, she said she spoke with President Trump in the Oval Office the day before and again that morning, that his commitment to enforcing all laws remains paramount alongside understanding producers’ labor challenges, and that the President directed her, Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer and Homeland Security Secretary Noem — all, she noted, with farming backgrounds — to ensure farmers and ranchers have the labor they need, with daily communication on solving it quickly, according to her testimony.

Why it matters

Rollins’s first Agriculture Committee appearance is the department’s consolidated early account — $7.7 billion in commodity assistance out the door and $5.5 billion in claimed program savings, as she stated them — and her Prop 12 and farm-labor answers fix USDA’s positions on the two issues producers pressed hardest.

Sources: House Committee on Agriculture, “To receive testimony from The Honorable Brooke L. Rollins, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture”, 2025-06-11 (official upload, embedded above; published 2025-06-11). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.