RFK Jr. vs. Rollins – an inevitable clash?
On February 13, the US Senate approved Robert Kennedy Jr. as the Trump administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. RFK Jr.’s nomination had generated a huge spike in interest, due to his background as a Democrat, short-lived presidential run (also as Democrat), famous family name, and his long held views on issues including vaccine safety and fluoridated water. A little less noticed was that, on the same day, the Senate also approved Brooke Rollins to serve as the United States Secretary of Agriculture.
The two political appointees seem destined to clash. Why? Because the departments that they lead have completely different priorities and serve opposing constituencies. While RFK Jr. wants to ‘Make America Healthy Again’, the stated mission of Brooke Rollins’ department is to ‘keep America’s farmers and ranchers in business’. And doing this tends to be in direct contradiction with RFK Jr.’s ambitions to ban the use of seed oils, pesticides and ultra-processed foods.
“Personnel is policy” was the slogan of the Reagan administration, said to have been devised by presidential adviser Scot Faulkner. The way that the current US Department of Agriculture is staffed offers a particularly interesting insight into its political priorities. While Secretary Rollins serves as the political head of USDA, the department’s day to day work will be overseen and carried out by a cadre of high-ranking staffers. The chief of staff at the US Department of Agriculture is Kailee Tkacz Buller, a former lobbyist for the very industries that RFK Jr. holds responsible for the US’s dietary ill-health and wants to regulate. Tkacz Buller previously served as the President & CEO of the National Oilseed Processors Association and the Edible Oil Producers Association. During the years of the Obama administration Tkacz Buller was director of food policy at the Corn Refiners Association and head of government affairs at SNAC International, the trade association of the snacking industry.
(This sort of job history is relatively common: Ann Veneman, the first Secretary of Agriculture in the George W. Bush administration, had previously worked as Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture and at the International Policy Council on Agriculture, “a trade group funded by agribusiness giants Nestlé, Kraft and Archer Daniels Midland”.[1])
Beyond staffing issues, it’s a simple fact that the US Department of Agriculture is expected to listen to and deliver the interests of US farming. US farmers are a hugely important political constituency and have tended to vote massively for Donald Trump. In the 444 most farming-dependent counties –defined as counties where 25% or more of average annual earnings are derived from farming, or 16% or more of jobs are in farming– 73.1% of voters supported Trump in 2016, increasing to 77.7% of voters in 2024. They won’t take kindly to Trump’s promise to let RFK Jr. “go wild” in ways that would “completely upend the existing U.S. food system” that they have grown accustomed to over the past six decades.
The coming clash between the RFK Jr.-led Department of Health and Human Services and the Rollins-led Department of Agriculture can -without oversimplifying too much- be attributed to corn. The United States is the world’s largest producer, consumer and exporter of corn. The terrain used for corn growing increased from 60.2 million acres in 1983 to around 90 million acres in 2018. While a large proportion of this goes towards ethanol production (which creates another potential policy clash with the Trump administration’s desire to drill for more oil and gas), corn is still used massively in animal feed (over 95% of US animal feed is corn-based) and in wet-milling (processing corn into products such as high fructose corn syrup, glucose, dextrose and cornstarch). In other words, corn -the most heavily subsidised crop in the country, receiving over $2 billion in federal money a year- facilitates both the US’s red meat-heavy diet and its overconsumption of cheaply sweetened, ultra-processed foods. Awkwardly, these are precisely the sorts of things that RFK Jr. has in his crosshairs.
In this collision of political priorities (academics like to call this policy (in)coherence, in the language of the real world it’s called good old fashioned political trade-offs) it’s hard to tell at this stage whether RFK Jr. or Brooke Rollins will prevail. President Trump has shown no great interest in either health policy or agriculture policy, so it’s unlikely that he would step in directly to mediate between his two Secretaries. This clash between ‘Make America Healthy Again’ and supporting a large and traditionally Republican-voting agriculture sector will almost certainly come to a head in the run up to the mid-term elections in November 2026. Let me know in the comments who you think will come out on top and why.
[1] Barton Gellmann (2008) Angler: the Shadow Presidency of Dick Cheney, Penguin Group, p 38.
