The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has slashed two programs that provided more than $1 billion for schools and food banks to purchase food from local farms and ranchers. About $660m of those funds were contained in the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, which provided funds to schools and child care facilities but is now being eliminated. The rest were part of the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which provided funds to local food banks and other organizations. The USDA unfroze funds for existing agreements, but a second round of funding in fiscal year 2025 has been nixed.

Rollins responded with a rambling, and transphobic, explanation in which she called the programs “nonessential” and equated them to other contracts she said the USDA canceled that supported what she called “food justice for trans people in New York and San Francisco.” In essence, the secretary portrayed these vital programs, which help make sure kids and poor people don’t starve, as forms of Biden administration largesse, baselessly claiming they are evidence of the previous administration trying to “push … taxpayer dollars out that is not reaching its intended target.”

But much like Elon Musk, who stood earlier this year and admitted his so-called Department of Government Efficiency would make “mistakes” that he vowed to correct “quickly,” Rollins seemed to leave room for a reversal. “As we have always said, if we are making mistakes, we will own those mistakes and we will reconfigure,” she said. “But right now, from what we are viewing, that program was nonessential, that it was a new program, and that it was an effort by the left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that were not necessary.”