An example of the magnitude of the error is that USDA’s July 2nd report said that the U.S. exported 38,434 metric tons of beef to Chile. The actual figure was 367 tons. Brooke Rollins is utterly useless, sure, but these continued errors are the outcome of an administration that is fact-resistant.
— Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD (@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social) July 11, 2026 at 3:22 PM
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Let’s also not forget DOGE’s part in this.
An example of the magnitude of the error is that USDA’s July 2nd report said that the U.S. exported 38,434 metric tons of beef to Chile. The actual figure was 367 tons. Brooke Rollins is utterly useless, sure, but these continued errors are the outcome of an administration that is fact-resistant.
— Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD (@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social) July 11, 2026 at 3:22 PM
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Incidentally, let’s not forget about another stupid thing Brooke Rollins has said
Replacing deported farmworkers with Medicaid recipients is unlikely to solve labor shortages. Similar state efforts left crops unharvested. Most able-bodied Medicaid recipients work, study, or provide care. Fewer workers could mean more food waste and higher grocery prices. tinyurl.com/yyc2fjxh
— David in Raeford (@david-raefordnc.bsky.social) July 10, 2026 at 11:07 AM
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AND Gutting the Forest SErvice
"Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told the public one thing and wrote the opposite into her own memo, in consecutive sentences. Then it fought in two federal courts to keep the plan #secret while it carried out the dismantling" of the #ForestService substack.com/@willpattiz/…
— Domestic Supply Adoptee for Reproductive Justice (@kalcyon.bsky.social) July 9, 2026 at 6:27 PM
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Via @morethanjustparks.bsky.social: “USDA’s answer is one of the most brazen legal dodges you’ll ever see from a federal agency. Instead of waiting for a court to weigh in, the department’s own general counsel wrote an internal memo declaring these appropriations laws unconstitutional…”
— Alt US Forest Service (@altusfs.altgov.info) July 10, 2026 at 1:21 PM
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The document is the Agency RIF and Reorganization Plan, the ARRP, and it reads like exactly what USDA was terrified you’d think. It sets a target. The department wants to gut its own workforce by at least 23 percent, and 31 percent once you set aside the food-safety inspectors it can’t legally touch. For the Forest Service, the number is a 15 percent cut, 22 percent with the public-safety carve-out stripped out. USDA dressed the whole thing up in a bloodless euphemism, “workforce optimization.” Translated into plain English, it means gutting the ranks of the people who guard your forests, on purpose, in writing, as official department policy.
And the method is where bad policy curdles into something shameful. USDA isn’t firing these people out in the open, because honest mass firings come with legal process and public scrutiny the department wanted to dodge. So it engineered a workaround. It orders career employees to uproot their families and haul themselves across the country, and it’s banking on them to quit instead of go. The plan says so in black and white. USDA “is anticipating that a significant number of employees will decline geographic reassignments,” and it states flatly that it won’t refill most of the jobs they leave behind. Force the move, pocket the resignations, leave the chairs empty for good. That’s engineered attrition, a purge dressed up as a relocation, and USDA put every word of it in writing.
Now hold that up against what USDA told you out loud. Secretary Brooke Rollins put her name on a July 2025 memo that assured the public, in plain words, that USDA “is not conducting a large-scale workforce reduction.” Read the very next sentence of that same memo and it calls the reorganization “another step of the Department’s process of reducing its workforce.” She contradicted herself inside a single paragraph. And the plan she spent the next year burying in federal court sets a target of cutting the workforce by at least 23 percent. It cannot all be true. One of these is a lie, and it isn’t hard to tell which one. USDA spent a solid year fighting to keep this plan in the dark. That’s the behavior of an agency hiding something, and now the whole country gets to see what. Rollins told America one thing in public and wrote down the opposite in private, then sent her department to two federal courts to keep the private version away from you. Let’s call it what it is, a full-blown cover-up.
Brooke Rollins squeals a lot about SNAP fraud. Turns out a SNAP vendor was one of the companies she hit up for $$ for a test drive to Trump's graft. democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/imo/media/do…
— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) July 2, 2026 at 2:28 PM
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