The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has 100,000 employees and a proposed budget of $25 billion for fiscal year 2025. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Brooke Rollins to lead the USDA in his administration. Rollins, who grew up in a farming family in Texas, has a background in agriculture development and previously worked in various roles in Trump’s administration. Trump praised Rollins for her commitment to American farmers and agricultural communities.
The USDA plays a crucial role in food safety, agricultural export policy, animal welfare, nutrition labeling, and managing federal lands. It also oversees programs related to agriculture research, crop insurance, and international agricultural trade. The agency’s budget request for fiscal year 2025 is $25.1 billion, an increase from the previous year.
The USDA’s budget is part of the larger Farm Bill, a comprehensive piece of legislation that sets funding priorities for agricultural programs. Convincing Congress to pass a new five-year Farm Bill will be a top priority for the new USDA secretary. The current Farm Bill, signed by Trump in 2018, was extended in 2023, but certain programs are set to expire soon.
Lawmakers representing agricultural states are likely to support a new Farm Bill, as it is crucial for the stability of the agriculture industry. The USDA’s budget request includes both mandatory and discretionary funding, with a total request of $213.3 billion for fiscal year 2025. That amounts to a 6.84-percent increase, totaling $2.16 billion above the fiscal 2024 level.
The stalled Farm Bill, which was passed by the House in 2024 but never made it to the Senate, sets out $1.46 trillion in expenditures for the next decade. This includes an average of $22.5 billion in annual discretionary spending, which is $3 billion less than what was authorized in the 2018 Farm Bill and $9 billion less than what the USDA requested for fiscal 2025.
Rollins will also need to tackle the issue of rising labor costs that are forcing small, family-owned farms out of business, as well as address the increasing loss of farmland to development.
According to the USDA, there are 544,000 fewer farms in the US than in 1980, and over 151 million acres that were once used for commercial crops are no longer being cultivated.
Other challenges facing the new secretary of agriculture include debates over “reference prices” to support farmers during market price drops, the management of the Commodity Credit Corporation by the USDA, and the decision on whether to permanently include one-time conservation funding from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act in the Farm Bill.
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