April 30, 2025 – This week, the Trump administration marked 100 days in office with a deluge of rallies, messaging, and fanfare.
During a visit to a Texas agriculture research center and farm with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said that President Trump “has given us a platform to change America for the better.”
Since January, Civil Eats has been following the flood of White House and agency announcements and actions to keep track of the most important changes that impact food and agriculture. We’ve been regularly talking to members of Congress, government employees, farmers, food bank employees, school food pros, researchers, and advocates to stay up to speed.
Here, we offer our own 100-day (and in no way comprehensive) review of our coverage of the biggest stories to date.
1. Quick action on political priorities. President Biden prioritized climate action and creating equity across the federal government, including at the agencies that work on food and agriculture; Trump made quick work of undoing those policies and programs. The term “climate change” was scrubbed from the USDA website and farmer grant programs that prioritized climate goals were frozen for review and targeted for cancellation.
The rooting out of what Trump calls “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA)” programs included throwing out the USDA’s report on historic discrimination and recommendations for course correction, shutting down the EPA’s environmental justice offices, and canceling grant contracts to farm groups that had identified working with groups such as Black or LGBTQ farmers in their proposals.
Under Rollins, USDA has also engaged in political disputes that don’t impact agriculture: the agency threatened to withhold funding from universities in Maine and California based on policies that supported transgender rights.
2. A farm (and food) economy in turmoil. “Farmers come first at the United States Department of Agriculture in the Trump Administration,” Rollins said in a USDA statement on the agency’s first 100 days of work. “At USDA, I have made bold changes to improve the lives of American producers and consumers.”
However, nearly all USDA grant programs were frozen for review when she took over, which has caused months of financial turmoil for farmers waiting for payments they had been planning on. Many programs have since been unfrozen; the fate of others remains unknown. In addition, more than $1 billion in expected payments to farmers to provide fresh food to schools and food banks was cancelled.
Biden’s Climate-Smart Commodities program was renamed and revamped, resulting in the cancellation of many multi-million dollar projects that were paying hundreds of farmers to implement conservation practices like agroforestry. Small farms selling locally to their communities have been particularly hard hit.
At the same time, Trump’s tariffs have created uncertainty, particularly for commodity farmers, like those who sell soybeans to China and import fertilizer from Canada. Trump has said the long-term payoff will be worth the short-term pain and Rollins has promised to bail out those farms if they do suffer losses—as Trump’s USDA did during his first administration. The USDA also quickly steered extra commodity assistance dollars authorized by Congress last year to commodity farmers.
3. Fewer people working on food and farming. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has worked with agencies to slash staff and cancel office leases. At the USDA, an estimated 16,000 employees took an offer to resign, thousands more were let go, and more layoffs are expected, although many employees have been reinstated due to court orders and the agency backtracking after firing key personnel.
At the FDA, Kennedy is reorganizing the entire agency, including eliminating 20,000 jobs. NOAA has cut at least 1,000 employees and may lose as much as 20 percent of its 13,000-person workforce. One report estimates DOGE’s approach to staff cuts will cost taxpayers $135 billion this year.
4. The MAHA movement focuses on food additives and SNAP. Since Kennedy took office, he’s focused the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement on food additives and unhealthy foods in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). He directed the FDA to review the controversial GRAS process and announced that the agency would work with industry to phase out six food dyes linked to hyperactivity in children.
Together, Kennedy and Rollins are supporting state-level efforts to ban soda and junk food from SNAP. At a food policy event in D.C. this week, one Hill staffer said MAHA initiatives are so popular among Republicans that they’ve “sucked all the air out of the room” in terms of other priorities like the farm bill.
5. Major rollbacks of environmental, food safety, and fisheries regulations. The EPA has been rolling back dozens of environmental regulations, including a key rule that allows for the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions at a time when the food system is reeling from the impacts of climate change. Trump also ordered the deregulation of the fishing industry, and the USDA scrapped rules that would have allowed the agency to stop salmonella-tainted chicken from reaching grocery shelves. (Link to this post.)
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