Daniel Glickman, who served as Secretary of Agriculture under President Bill Clinton, said Kennedy’s past makes him an unlikely candidate. “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 so. [Kennedy] That’s 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.
President Kennedy may not be able to directly influence pesticide regulation, but he said he would try to “weaponize” other pesticides. government agency for “Chemical Agriculture,” which commissions scientific research into the effects of pesticides. The USDA Agricultural Research Service has a discretionary budget of nearly $2 billion for research on crops, livestock, nutrition, food safety, and the natural environment. resource protection.
There are other avenues the agriculture secretary could pull, Blaustein-Leit said. USDA is investing Passed $3 billion Partnership for climate-smart products. A plan to make U.S. agriculture more climate-friendly. The USDA Secretary could put their 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 U.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.
