Daniel Glickman, who served as Secretary of Agriculture under President Bill Clinton, said Mr. Kennedy’s past is unlikely to make him a candidate for Agriculture Secretary. “Given President Trump’s traditional base in the center, it’s hard to imagine the president choosing someone who advocates breaking up big farms and destroying integrated agriculture,” Glickman said. he says.
Like the top HHS position, the USDA director’s position must be approved by a vote of the Senate. “I don’t think (Kennedy) is a slam dunk,” Glickman said.
During President Trump’s first term, he chose Sonny Perdue, a former Georgia governor and founder of an agricultural trading company, to head the Department of Agriculture. Most agriculture secretaries have backgrounds in industry or politics, and these are two important elections for someone in charge of a department that is comprised of 29 agencies, including forestry, conservation and nutrition programs, and employs nearly 100,000 people. It is a ward. “The difference between Sonny Perdue and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is like night and day,” Glickman says.
If Kennedy is confirmed as agriculture secretary, he may have a hard time enacting the most radical parts of the policy. Dan Blaustein-Leit, director of agricultural policy and research at the Breakthrough Institute, said that although he is an outspoken critic of pesticides, the USDA is generally not in charge of regulating pesticides. . Rather, the EPA regulates pesticides for public health purposes.
Although President Kennedy may not be able to directly influence pesticide regulations, he has sought to “weaponize” other government agencies against “chemical agriculture” by commissioning scientific research on the effects of pesticides. He said there was. The USDA Agricultural Research Service has a discretionary budget of nearly $2 billion for research on crops, livestock, nutrition, food safety, and natural resource conservation.
There are other avenues the agriculture secretary could pull, Blaustein-Leit said. USDA is investing $3 billion through the Partnership for Climate-Smart Products. The plan aims to make U.S. agriculture more climate-friendly. The USDA Secretary could put his thumb on the scale by influencing the selection criteria for these types of programs. USDA also oversees the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC). The CCC has a $5 billion fund to support farm income and conservation programs and assist farmers affected by natural disasters. The USDA Secretary may influence how the Department of Agriculture allocates these CCC funds.
President Kennedy also asserted that corporate interests capture the nation’s dietary guidelines and promised to eliminate conflicts of interest from the USDA group that develops the dietary guidelines. Because the U.S. Dietary Guidelines are jointly developed by USDA and HHS and updated every five years, the Secretary of Agriculture has limited opportunity to influence recommendations.
“If the RFK were to take on a high-level policy role, we would see more talk about ultra-processed foods, but we don’t know what that actually means in terms of dietary guidelines,” Blaustein-Leit said. he says. .
Most experts WIRED spoke to believe that President Kennedy’s more extreme positions are likely to be constrained by bureaucracy. But the message that elevating vaccine skeptics and conspiracy theorists loudly remains a serious concern heading into a potential second Trump administration.
