When Robert F Kennedy Jr. suspended his campaign for the presidency in August 2024, throwing his support behind Donald Trump, he promised to continue fighting to “make America healthy again”. Kennedy’s criticism of ultra-processed foods and big food companies became a central feature of the Trump campaign. And after Trump was elected, he nominated Kennedy to be his secretary of health and human services.
Yet, just days before naming Kennedy, Trump nominated another senior official to his administration: Susie Wiles, a longtime lobbyist whose clients have included the same big food companies Kennedy has critiqued for their role in pushing ultra-processed foods into kitchens and grocery stores across the US. The two stood in stark contrast: a critic and a lobbyist for the food industry standing side-by-side the president-elect.
Contradictions are one of the defining characteristics of Trump’s new inner circle – whether it’s the use of tariffs or certain immigrant visas – and food and agriculture policy are no exception. These conflicts, which range from mass deportations to food stamps, raise questions about what these policies under a second Trump term would look like. But the throughline, food policy researchers say, seems to be a willingness to present policies that deregulate industry while purporting to prioritize the health of everyday Americans (in addition to an abiding loyalty to Trump).
“I would not be surprised to see industry interests ultimately beating out any more recent rhetoric around commitments to health,” said Philip Kahn-Pauli, director of legislative affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
“One of the bigger things that’s keeping me up at night is that we’ll continue to see trust in science come under attack, we’ll see misinformation and disinformation about nutrition and health proliferate and possibly even be platformed by government agencies, and that we’ll continue to see corporations benefiting at the expense of consumers.”
Trump’s nominees – some of whom must still pass Senate confirmation hearings – have varied backgrounds on food and agricultural policy. Whether or not they’ll lead work on food or agricultural policy, their divergent opinions show the incongruities at play in the president’s incoming administration.
On food assistance, there’s Office of Management and Budget nominee Russ Vought, who in his work authoring parts of Project 2025 has called for more than $400bn in cuts to food stamps. But there’s also education department pick Linda McMahon, who temporarily received food stamps in her 20s and has previously said she’d fight to protect them.
On farm workers, there’s Lori Chavez-DeRemer, nominated to be labor secretary, who has sponsored pro-union legislation and championed non-immigrant H-2A visas as a solution to the agricultural labor shortage. At the same time, there’s Tom Homan, the “border czar” who’s been tasked with overseeing mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, including thousands who labor in fields and factories picking and processing food.
And on climate, there’s Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin, who has a 14% rating from the League of Conservation Voters – and Florida-born officials such as Marco Rubio, who has been confirmed as secretary of state, and national security adviser Mike Waltz, who have been lobbied by local citrus growers after their state was devastated by hurricanes that have grown in magnitude as a result of the climate crisis.
There are officials who have called for greater regulations – such as Elise Stefanik, who’s called for restrictions around what kinds of companies can use words like “egg” to describe their products – and those who have called for fewer – such as Kristi Noem, who’s advocated for loosening rules around meat packaging.
“I think it’s pretty clear across most, if not all, of the appointments that he is choosing people who will not say no,” said Karen Perry Stillerman, deputy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Food and Environment program. That’s particularly clear in his choice for head of the department of agriculture: Brooke Rollins.
“We know so little about her in terms of what she thinks and knows about agriculture,” Stillerman said. Rollins previously served as head of the America First Policy Institute, a thinktank she founded in 2021 to further Trump’s policies, but which does not conduct agricultural research. “So I have no idea if she is someone who can tell her boss that he’s wrong and that something would be a bad idea or not.”
Rollins is well known as a Trump loyalist, who was expected to receive a position in the White House – and may be in line for chief of staff if Trump goes through as many as he did during his previous administration, Kahn-Pauli says.
Stillerman and Kahn-Pauli say it’s worth considering what actions Trump took on food and agriculture during his first presidency: deregulating meatpackers, withdrawing from climate agreements, calling for deportations of immigrant farm and factory workers, proposing dramatic cuts to food assistance programs, and gutting environmental and health agencies.
“We’ve seen this movie before,” said Stillerman. “Trump has promised to fire government scientists and dismantle science agencies. And this really matters whether you’re talking about the USDA or the Department of Labor or the FDA or anything else, because when science is sidelined, people get hurt.”
Those previous policies suggest what may be to come – on the same and other food issues.
For example, a dismissal of science worries Mary Jo Dudley, director of the Cornell Farmworker Program – especially as avian flu cases multiply among farm workers. Combined with Trump’s proposed deportations, she worries undocumented or other migrant farm workers will contract the disease and then postpone seeking treatment.
“There is a chilling where you have law enforcement vehicles outside the health clinic,” she said.
Lindsey Smith Taillie, who studies the efficacy of nutritional labels as co-director of the University of North Carolina’s Global Food Research Program, also thinks Trump’s past preferences for deregulation suggest where his administration may go with nutrition guidelines, including how it proceeds with work already under way to update the dietary guidelines in 2025 and require companies to print front-of-package labels on certain foods.
“They’re going to have to find a way to square this tension between the fact that it’s really the food industry that’s making us sick, and the inherently deregulatory nature of the Republican party – and Trump in particular,” she said.
In order to do that, she predicts Trump’s team may focus on reformulating foods, rather than addressing the root causes of chronic diet-related disease. For example, she points to Kennedy’s intention to require food companies replace high-fructose corn syrup with cane sugar. It’s “just a distraction from the real issue of added sugar,” she said.
“This allows them to claim that they’re taking action to ‘make America healthy again’, while actually just working with the food industry to marginally reformulate their foods and claim that they’re acting in the best interest of the public,” she said, noting that the food industry has long followed the playbook of the tobacco industry to deny, delay and distract consumers and lawmakers from regulations. “It’s almost like a marketing ploy.”
That same discord is apparent in Trump’s choice to name Kailee Tkacz Buller – who most recently served as the president and CEO of the National Oilseed Processors Association, a seed-oil trade group – as chief of staff of the USDA. News of her appointment came just a day after Trump’s Make America Healthy Again inaugural ball featured a seed oil-free menu (Kennedy has claimed that Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils such as canola and sunflower oil, despite no evidence to support that claim.)
Stillerman notes another topic Trump and his cabinet nominees may use as a distraction: Chinese ownership of US farmland. Although China has purchased land in the United States – earning the ire of Trump appointees Rollins, Noem and Waltz – it’s far less than that purchased by other foreign countries such as Canada, the UK and Germany.
“If you look at ownership of US farmland, you will find that the bigger issue is consolidation of farmland in the hands of fewer and fewer wealthy landowners and investment firms,” Stillerman said.
Some of Trump’s closest relationships may suggest policies he is apt to pursue sooner than others.
For example, his deputy chief Stephen Miller – who served in his previous administration – sued the Biden administration’s agriculture department on behalf of a group of white farmers over the definition of “socially disadvantaged” that Congress used to create a $4bn debt relief plan for Black farmers during the pandemic. That indicates that further anti-discrimination policies at the USDA may be on the chopping block.
Similarly, Elon Musk – who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars helping to elect Trump – has agricultural aims of his own. Besides calling for dramatic budget cuts, which may impact food assistance programs, Musk’s Starlink and SpaceX programs are also invested in a practice called “precision agriculture” where high-speed internet allows farmers to use satellites and other technology to gather data on what parts of their land require fertilizer, water and other resources. Trump’s pick for FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr, who was first appointed to the role during Trump’s first term, has spearheaded the agency’s new “precision agriculture” taskforce.
“It can be expensive. It can be out of reach for many farmers,” said Stillerman. “It is like so many tech solutions. It tends to enrich the creators of the technology and the sellers of the technology and the inputs more than it does the people working the farm.”
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