Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has been threatening to withhold funding for educational institutions if they continue to support transgender students and athletes.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has long been a sprawling agency with often-conflicting goals. It’s in charge of both promoting healthy diets through the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, school food and nutrition assistance programs and boosting commodity crops, which are dumped into our food system in the form of unhealthy, ultra-processed foods and excessive amounts of meat and dairy.
But since its founding, the USDA’s role has been to recognize the vital importance of agriculture in our country and to protect America’s food supply.
So if you’re wondering how attacking transgender youth helps our food system, you’re not alone.
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has been busy over the past few weeks threatening to withhold funding for educational institutions from Maine to California if they continue to support transgender students and athletes.
These threats are technically within her jurisdiction since any federal agency can enforce certain policies, like Title IX, when it comes to that agency’s funding decisions. And the USDA pours hundreds of millions of dollars a year into research, program development, student recruitment and other initiatives at colleges and universities—particularly land-grant universities—across the country.
But the point of this anti-trans crusade isn’t to improve agriculture or save the government money. It’s not even to actually enforce Title IX, which was established to prevent sex discrimination in educational institutions, since attacks on transgender students are nothing if not discriminatory. It’s simply Secretary Rollins doubling down on Trump’s agenda of cruelty.
She’s doing so at the expense of our food system.
While Secretary Rollins is focusing on made-up issues around transgender athletes and youth that only put their physical and mental health and well-being at greater risk, food prices continue to rise as the risk of recession looms. Farmers and rural communities have lost critical funding as the administration has taken a scythe to USDA funding, from freezing grants that small farmers relied on to stay in business to cutting programs that enabled schools and food banks to buy local produce.
Farmers are becoming collateral damage in Trump’s trade wars. Bird flu continues to spread as government transparency narrows to a pinhole and dangerous, anti-science rhetoric gains steam—a combination that could be disastrous for public health, farm workers, food prices, farmed animals and wildlife.
And all of this is against the backdrop of climate change, which is already threatening agriculture as we know it. No matter how much the Trump administration cuts popular climate-smart agriculture programs or tries to bury the science, it can’t change the reality of uncertain growing seasons, extreme storms, drought, disease and other climate impacts on food production.
It’s not just the price of eggs at stake, it’s the health of our food system. The time and energy spent on cruel, unnecessary attacks on transgender youth are a distraction from fixing our broken food system.
Even worse, these attacks force educational institutions to choose between protecting vulnerable students and losing funding that’s supporting the next generation of farmers and research that could create a resilient food system for everyone.
Secretary Rollins needs to stop bullying educational institutions into following her harmful, anti-trans agenda and focus on the real, existential threats to small farmers and food security in America.
