Who cares if Trump’s ag chief is from Fort Worth when she slashes food-bank funding? | Opinion

One month before Brooke Rollins pulled $2 million from Fort Worth dinner tables, the city she threatened to starve honored her ascension.

The downtown office building became a red, white and blue beacon commemorating Rollins as the new U.S. secretary of agriculture and the first Cowtown native to join a presidential cabinet. Mayor Mattie Parker, who once said there was no one “more qualified and prepared to lead the Department of Agriculture,” called attention to the “historic moment for our city.”

After Rollins boasted that she was “putting the American farmer first,” the cuts siphoned money that the Tarrant Area Food Bank used to purchase produce from local farmers (and feeding Parker’s constituents.) The food bank’s president and CEO, Julie Buntner, told the Star-Telegram on Friday that the funding allowed her organization to reduce reliance on shipping food from other states or countries but “grow it right here locally, and bring it directly into our grocery stores, and into our local food bank.”

Rollins touted her work with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, “to streamline USDA operations by cutting wasteful spending.” Rollins bragged about DOGE identifying and canceling a $600,000 grant for scientists studying menstrual health because the research might benefit some transgender people. She proudly scrapped a $397,000 federal grant to Agroecology Commons, a California nonprofit that incubates young farmers — something Rollins also said was a priority just two weeks ago — because the nonprofit welcomes minorities and queer people to its program.

Flaunting your million-dollar hair clippers while hiding your billion-dollar buzzsaw feels like sleight of hand, but I can grimly appreciate her indirect admissions. First: Some Americans don’t deserve healthy lives. Second: What you call dinner, Rollins sees as waste.

I like Rollins’ confessions. I love her timing. Our secretary of agriculture is slashing access to American-grown produce just as American consumers are increasingly pessimistic about rising costs. Economists are just as convinced that President Donald Trump’s threats of tariffs on Mexican and Canadian products will raise prices at the grocery store. Yet the Trump administration insists its trade war will ultimately benefit American farmers, promising them that “nobody is going to be able to compete with you.”

Promises kept, I guess. But what if nobody can afford you either? By pulling those grants, Rollins appears determined to find out.

Before the Trump administration invented new ways to raid your kitchen, groups like the Tarrant Area Food Bank have spent decades filling in the gaps. According to its website, the bank serves “more than 1 million meals each week to a half million residents facing food insecurity.” But after Rollins pulled 40% of Tarrant Area Food Bank’s expected food budget, the organization won’t be able to provide food for needy people at the same scale.

Without a massive increase in donor or state-level funding, more of your neighbors will have to make a choice between their rent and their groceries. Some will go hungry. Some will grow hungrier.

Their hunger is a direct result of a decision thousands of miles away at a desk in Washington, a safe distance from the people who have to suffer the consequences of her actions.

When I asked Parker what she would do to rectify the damages from the woman she told us to celebrate, the mayor told me she was “working to communicate directly with the USDA and Secretary Rollins on the short and long-term effects this move will have on our community.” Parker didn’t outright contend with my question about whether the funding was wasteful, but told me that “food is medicinal” and defended the defunded program as “tremendously successful in providing life-saving nutrition to our community.”

Still, while hungry families wait on Parker to call in a favor, she didn’t mention whether or not she regretted praising her friend’s promotion since the funding was suspended. Before anointing Rollins because of her birth certificate, Fort Worth and its leaders should have waited on how Rollins would affect her country, let alone her home. Being from a place, even this place, doesn’t make her special. But being for a place? That’s where legacies are made.

Rollins has a tidily metaphorical Bible verse she references on her X (formerly Twitter) account’s bio, a quote from Christ himself:

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.”

Jesus was as right as Brooke. Fort Worth illuminated the world about what it values. There’s no hiding who we are now, because after all, they shall know us by our fruit.

This story was originally published March 18, 2025 at 5:28 AM with the headline "Who cares if Trump’s ag chief is from Fort Worth when she slashes food-bank funding? | Opinion."