Karma's Most Wanted #6: Brooke Rollins

BROOKE ROLLINS

Musk. Zuckerberg. Thiel. The internet has chewed through them so many times the outrage has gone stale. But while everyone was watching the usual suspects, someone else quietly walked into one of the most powerful positions in the American government and got to work. And they are just as bad.

Her name is Brooke Rollins. You probably don't know it. That is exactly the problem.

Rollins is the United States Secretary of Agriculture. She controls the food supply for the most vulnerable people in this country. She oversees 100,000 employees, 45 million acres of national forest, and a food assistance program that 42 million Americans depend on to eat. She has no agricultural policy experience. What she does have is loyalty, and in this administration that is the only currency that matters.

Before her confirmation she ran the America First Policy Institute, a think tank so devoted to the Trump agenda it was described as a shadow government in waiting. The word "think" was doing a lot of heavy lifting there. She spent years building the blueprint for exactly what is now happening. Then she walked through the door and started executing it.

But first... she got paid.

Her annual bonus at AFPI was $50,000 in 2022. $50,000 in 2023. The moment her nomination became public knowledge that bonus jumped all the way up to $300,000. Her total compensation for 2024 exceeded $1 million dollars. The people writing those checks knew exactly what they were buying. Federal ethics guidelines require officials who receive such payments to recuse themselves from related matters for two years. She has not. She likely doesn't even know that guideline exists.

She was sworn in on February 13th, 2025. The firings began the exact same day.

Employees helping farmers build irrigation systems. Scientists battling invasive crop diseases that could devastate entire industries. Workers repairing the leaky roofs of low income rural seniors. Pest and disease scientists. Farm loan processors. All gone. At least 16,000 USDA employees took buyout offers in the first wave alone, with reports indicating the department was targeting 30,000 total cuts, a third of the entire workforce.

Farm groups told Rollins directly at a roundtable in Fargo that the cuts to USDA staffing would make it harder for farmers to secure needed loans. Her response was to promise FSA workers were safe. Her department had already fired them.

USDA had approximately 98,473 employees in September 2024. Since January 2025 it has lost at least 18,000 staff, with Rollins herself saying she expects 50 to 70 percent of remaining staff to accept relocation as part of reorganization, indicating thousands more experienced employees may leave.

After paying over 15,000 employees to leave, Rollins testified before Congress that USDA is now actively recruiting to fill critical positions, acknowledging mistakes may have been made. She then invited some of those she had pushed out to come back, saying "if they want to come back, and if they were in a key position, we would love to have that conversation."

She fired them. Bragged about it. Realized she needed them and asked them to come back. Incompetence does not even begin to cover this administration's mistakes and plain ignorance on literally every subject.

Terminations hit the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service's National Animal Health Laboratory, the Forest Service, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Farm Service Agency, and the Rural Development mission area. Every single division that touches the actual ground.

On that same first day she convened a panel on bird flu, reviewed the federal response, and discussed the strategy. Then her department fired the scientists fighting it. A quarter of employees in a critical bird flu testing office were cut. One of the department's research facilities partially shut down. The panel met in the morning. The pink slips went out before the week was over.

The food safety inspector general who had just ordered a probe into the Boar's Head listeria outbreak that killed Americans was escorted out of her office. Rollins installed her own former senior advisor in the role. The person investigating the food supply was replaced by someone whose career depends on Rollins.

Quietly, with no press coverage, she withdrew the regulatory framework for Salmonella in raw poultry that had been in development for years. She ended the Clinton era roadless rule, opening 45 million acres of protected national forest to road construction and resource extraction. She withheld SNAP administrative funds from blue states as a political weapon.

Conveniently, Rollins' husband is an executive at an oil and gas company, according to her financial disclosure form. Suddenly, opening 45 million acres of national forest to resource extraction seems like it may be a family affair. The grift is happening right in front of the eyes of the American people and all it seems we can do is tweet and angry share about it.

Then came October 31st, 2025.

The Confession

Brooke Rollins stood at a podium next to Mike Johnson and looked into the cameras. What came out of her mouth was the most honest thing she has ever said in public office.

"Your government is failing you right now. Poverty is not red or blue. It is not a Republican or Democrat issue. It doesn't matter who you voted for or even if you voted. If you are in a position where you can't feed your family and you are relying on that $187 a month for an average family in the SNAP program, we have failed you."

Forty-two million Americans heard that. Forty-two million people relying on $187 a month heard the woman controlling their food supply admit the government was failing them.

Mike Johnson lunged for the microphone before she could breathe. "When she says 'we have failed you,' she means 'we, the Democrats.'"

Nobody redirected her. She meant we. She said exactly what she meant.

The Backslide

Three weeks later the shutdown ended. The cameras came back. Rollins returned to the microphone. The woman who called food assistance a moral obligation in October had a new word for it in November.

"Clearly there's a right-sizing that needs to happen with the program," Rollins said in an about-face that left many Americans fuming. Right-sizing. That is the word she chose. Not for her $300,000 bonus that arrived the moment her nomination leaked. Not for the three day AFPI galas she attended on your tax dollar. Right-sizing was reserved for the $187 a month feeding the families she stood in front of and wept for.

But here is what she said at that same October press conference, in the same breath as her confession, before Johnson could stop her. She called SNAP "bloated, broken, dysfunctional, and corrupt."

She didn't slip up on October 31st. She told you exactly who she was in both sentences. The grief was the performance. The cuts were always the plan.

That may be the only truth she has ever told.

Brooke Rollins oversees the food supply for the poorest Americans while collecting a million dollar payday from the industry groups she still privately serves. She fired the scientists fighting bird flu on the same day she announced a bird flu strategy. She replaced her own watchdog with her own aide. She called a program feeding 42 million people broken and bloated and in the same sentence she called it a moral failure. And almost nobody knows her name.

Rollins claimed this week that 4.3 million Americans were removed from SNAP, attributing it largely to fraud. The Associated Press fact-checked her and found that experts say the primary reason is the $186 billion in SNAP cuts Republicans pushed through Congress, projected to cut 20 percent of the program over ten years. When asked for data supporting her fraud claims, her department referred the AP to the New York Post--a tabloid.

The agency that is supposed to be the authoritative source on American agriculture and food security, the agency with 100,000 employees and a hundred billion dollar budget, responded to a fact check request by citing a newspaper that is famous for its Page Six gossip column.

That is not incompetence. That is contempt. It says "we do not have the data, we know we do not have the data, and we do not care that you know we do not have the data. Fuck you."

On January 9th, 2026, Rollins suspended all financial awards to the state of Minnesota and city of Minneapolis, citing widespread and systemic fraud associated with federal benefit programs. Cutting food funding to an entire state as political punishment while 4.3 million Americans lose benefits is certainly a choice.

While Rollins claims people no longer need food stamps because of a strong economy, food prices rose 3.1 percent in 2025 and are expected to increase another 2.9 percent in 2026. Higher income Americans benefited most from wage growth while lower income households struggled with weaker income gains and steep prices.

Rollins told Breitbart in May 2025: "It isn't just about the next four years. It's about the next 250 years." She is not managing a department. She is executing a generational demolition and she said so out loud. She is engaging in a revolution for the right.

She is not a footnote. She is not a supporting character. She is the person deciding whether your neighbor eats this month. She is fully deserving of karma's wrath.

In the end, karma always wins.