Winning the W.A.R.

The animal welfare case for Brooke Rollins.

In baseball, the term “Wins Above Replacement” (WAR) refers to the value a player brings to a team in excess of a player who could be acquired at little or no cost, like a minor league recruit or an easy-to-get free agent.¹ If a player has a high WAR, it means they’re going to be a lot more helpful to the team than a replacement-level player — “a player who’s right on the fringe between being a big leaguer and not, someone you can call up from AAA or pick up on the waiver wire.” (This term came to my attention when Nate Silver conveniently defined it a few weeks ago, but “AAA” and “waiver wire” are still beyond my comprehension.)

On Saturday, a splendid little WAR was won for farmed animals when president-elect Donald Trump announced conservative activist and lawyer Brooke Rollins as his nominee for Secretary of Agriculture. Rollins is far from an animal advocate, and if confirmed, she’s likely to undo regulations on factory farms and slaughterhouses and continue to put the USDA’s thumb on the scale in favor of animal agriculture. But she nevertheless may be one of the best choices to lead up the USDA that could come out of a Republican administration. Compared to the replacement-level candidates, Rollins is more likely to support preserving state-level animal welfare laws, oppose new restrictions on alternative proteins, and push back on subsidies for factory farms. While she’s no Shohei Ohtani — who (I’m told) is the best baseball player of all time — she’s helped animal advocates win a WAR before the real battle has even begun.

We can divide the reasons for this into two categories: The relative advantages of Rollins, and the danger of a replacement-level Republican agriculture secretary.

For Rollins

First and foremost, Rollins ain’t the others. Whereas most agricultural policy experts in the Republican coalition are either factory farmers themselves or else serve as lobbyists for the livestock industry, Rollins is a lifelong conservative activist with no particular affinity for animal agriculture.

At the core of Rollins’s ideological mission are traditional Republican principles like federalism, free markets, and free trade. From 2003 to 2018, she ran the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank focused on general deregulation and shrinking government. From 2018 to 2021, she served in the first Trump administration as a domestic policy advisor focused on criminal justice and states’ rights. And after leaving the White House, she founded the America First Policy Institute, a so-called “government-in-waiting” for the second Trump administration with a similar policy bent as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

As Politico’s Ian Ward wrote in a feature of Rollins in October:

Among the nationalist-populist wing of the GOP, Rollins and her allies at AFPI are viewed as the rump faction of the old Republican establishment, dedicated to preserving the pre-Trump political orthodoxy that prioritizes free trade, deregulation, business-friendly economic policies and an expansive role for the U.S. on the global stage.

Although the pro-states’ rights and free market position is widely (and in many sectors, correctly) associated with corporate-friendly policies, the opposite is true in industrial animal agriculture. As animal rights lawyer and activist Wayne Hsiung suggested prior to the election, because the federal government intervenes so aggressively in the market to promote factory farming, it’s really the case that a more laissez-faire position is typically better for farmed animals. Thus, if Trump followed the recommendations of his conservative policy advisors at Heritage and AFPI and abolished many of the subsidy programs that prop up animal agriculture, then “[w]hile there are many other specific laws that [Kamala] Harris might be better on […] Trump [would] probably [be] the better choice on federal legislation affecting animal rights” because farm subsidies are so important.

If Rollins sticks to her pro-market position on food and agriculture — as she has on a wide range of issues over her two-decade career in public policy — she promises to be an unlikely ally to animal advocates across almost all of the most important policy issues for farmed animal welfare in the United States today. And where she’s likely to diverge from the pro-animal position — namely, on regulating factory farms — her inexperience with agriculture policy and lack of qualifications to lead the USDA make her a less dangerous choice than a replacement-level Republican.

Animal welfare laws

The greatest single political threat to farmed animal welfare in the United States today is the EATS Act, which would prohibit state and local governments from imposing regulations on agricultural practices that exceed federal standards. If passed, it would nullify laws in over a dozen states prohibiting intensive confinement of farmed animals and force over 40 million chickens and 1 million pigs back into cages too small for them to stand up, sit down, turn around, or extend their limbs. As Chelsea Blink, director of farm animal legislation at the ASPCA, has put it, “[i]f the EATS Act is incorporated into the Farm Bill, decades of progress would be rolled back at the expense of animal welfare, farmers, workers, consumers, and our environment.”

Source: Vox.

Many Republicans — including the Trump campaign — have supported the EATS Act and related efforts to overturn state laws. However, a vocal minority of the party committed to states’ rights has opposed the legislation for ripping away authority from local governments. While Rollins has not taken a public position on the bill, she’s been a vocal champion of states’ rights throughout her career, telling the Fort-Worth Star Telegram in 2018 that she looked forward to working as an advisor to Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner so she could capitalize on the opportunity represented by the Trump White House “to completely reinvigorate the idea that the states should be running themselves.” Rollins’s think tank, AFPI, has also repeatedly published about states’ rights and claims federalism is an integral part of “the American way of life.”

Alternative proteins

Another major threat to farmed animals in the next administration is the increasing burden of regulation on plant-based and cultivated meat. Fourteen Republican-controlled states currently have laws prohibiting plant-based and cultivated meat companies from accurately labeling their products as “meat,” while Florida and Alabama have banned cultivated meat altogether. Republicans have also introduced bills or expressed interest in banning cultivated meat in Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming. And on a federal level, efforts to restrict labeling for alternative proteins in the last Congress received support from 25 House Republicans and one Senator as sponsors or cosponsors — mostly from Trump stalwarts like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — whose portfolio includes the Food and Drug Administration, which, alongside the USDA, is responsible for approving cell-cultured products — has also promoted a baseless conspiracy theory that “fake meat” is part of a plot by Bill Gates to control the world’s food supply.

Rollins is unlikely to go along with this crusade. Even though outrageous claims and dishonest narratives about so-called “lab-grown meat” over the past year have taken the Republican base by storm, Rollins and AFPI have never mentioned cultivated meat in their policy agenda. The Heritage Foundation, with whose leadership Rollins has deep professional and ideological ties, has mentioned cultivated meat only once, as evidence that economic growth and environmental protection can go hand-in-hand. And the ideologically similar Institute for Justice has even filed a lawsuit against Florida’s cultivated meat ban on the grounds that it’s protectionist and therefore unconstitutional.

Farm subsidies

During the first Trump administration, farm subsidies rose every year, from $14 billion in 2017 to $52 billion in 2020. Most of the rise was driven by Trump’s $61 billion in bailouts to farmers hurt by his trade wars, the lion’s share of which went to dairies, hog farms, and producers of “nonspecialty crops” commonly used as livestock feed. According to Republican agricultural leaders, Trump is likely to seek to bail out farmers again if they lose market access due to his planned trade wars, but he may face pushback from fiscal conservatives in Congress who have sought to restrict the administration’s authority to spend money unilaterally.

Politico suggests it’s unlikely that Rollins would offer much resistance to Trump’s second-term plans to impose massive tariffs and bail out farmers, since she’s been a Trump loyalist “who has praised his economic plans.” Yet, Rollins has also been a uniquely effective advocate for ushering through policies that ostensibly conflict with Trump’s first principles. Despite opposition from the hard right, for example, Rollins managed to get Trump to champion criminal justice reform, a stark reversal on one of the core policy issues of his 2016 campaign:

Throughout 2018, Rollins worked closely with Kushner and policy adviser Ja’Ron Smith to build support on Capitol Hill for Kushner’s criminal justice reform package — as well as to beat back opposition from within the administration, led by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Kushner and Rollins eventually prevailed, with Trump signing a slate of bipartisan prison and sentencing reforms into law as the First Step Act in December 2018.

If anyone is well-positioned to advocate for the second Trump administration to stop propping up factory farming with massive amounts of taxpayer money — or at least to curtail the amount given to farmers in second-term bailouts — it’s Rollins. While eliminating most farm subsidies would require legislative action that’s unlikely to pass, the agriculture secretary has wide discretionary authority over the Commodity Credit Corporation, a $30 billion per year slush fund that’s used to prop up commodity prices by purchasing agricultural products and making payments to farmers. If Trump is hell-bent on bailing out farmers — as it seems he was during his first term (probably because he thought he needed rural votes in the Midwest to win re-election) — there may be nothing to stop more federal money from flowing into the coffers of livestock producers. But having a genuinely committed free market conservative at the helm of the CCC nonetheless increases the chance that proposals to bail out farmers would receive pushback in internal administration debates or be slow-walked until Trump’s attention turns somewhere else.

Deregulation

Any Republican USDA secretary would likely order their staffers to deregulate slaughterhouses and factory farms. During Trump’s first administration, regulators killed a rule establishing welfare standards for organic poultry, wiped Animal Welfare Act enforcement data from the USDA’s website, and sharply increased the maximum line speeds at pig and poultry slaughterhouses. While the Biden administration has reimposed many of the rules undone by Trump, Biden’s actions are almost certain to be reversed as soon as Trump retakes office. This is because staffers at think tanks like AFPI have spent the past four years diligently identifying which federal rules to eliminate, what actions need to be taken to eliminate them, and what staffers ought to be appointed to make sure the job is done quickly and thoroughly.

The sole advantage Rollins might have here is that she’s simply so grossly unqualified for her position — and has such a shallow understanding of agricultural policy and the USDA bureaucracy — that she wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of the process of dismantling the department’s already-weak regulatory apparatus. This isn’t a very likely proposition, since Republican think tanks have already consulted with policy experts and assembled resume banks and detailed action plans to implement their agenda. But the chance that something may go awry, and staffers would cause marginally less damage to farmed animal welfare, is greater with Rollins in charge than it would be under a more competent candidate with ag policy expertise.

Against the Median Republican

There’s wisdom in thinking at the margin. Although Rollins will probably be a very bad Secretary of Agriculture for farmed animals, she’s almost certainly superior to the replacement-level candidate. This is because the other USDA candidates considered by Trump are — almost to a man (and one woman) — all financially linked or otherwise beholden to animal agriculture and factory farming.

Trump’s reported choice for USDA Secretary as of late Friday night, former U.S. Senator from Georgia Kelly Loeffler, is a one-time member of the Senate Agriculture Committee and the daughter of livestock feed suppliers who have received over $4.1 million in farm subsidies since 1995. In 2020, Loeffler’s last year in the Senate, she received a score of zero on the Humane Society Legislative Fund’s Humane Scorecard, and she praised Trump’s farmer bailouts prior to the 2020 election.

Another reported leading USDA candidate, House Agriculture Committee chair Glenn Thompson, has repeatedly inserted EATS Act language into Republican drafts of the farm bill and called on Congress to pass a “Prop 12 fix” overturning the law. Two former first Trump administration officials who were reportedly included on Trump’s USDA shortlist — former ag policy advisor Ray Starling and ambassador Kip Tom — have also both spoken out against Prop 12, with Tom writing an op-ed calling on Congress to overturn it. Starling, perhaps the most outspoken defender of business as usual in the agricultural industry, claimed at last year’s Animal Agriculture Alliance Stakeholders Summit that the notion that the food system is “broken” — that “billions of animals and thousands of humans suffer behind the walls of factory farms” — is “absurd” and “ridiculous.”

Two of the three remaining names on Trump’s reported shortlist, agribusiness executive Charles Herbster and Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, are both cattle ranchers who have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal farm subsidy payments and called for restrictions on alternative proteins.

And the final candidate, former lieutenant governor of California Abel Maldonado, is a strawberry farmer who was described by the Los Angeles Daily News as being a moderate with “a soft spot for animal rights” — but he took no public position on his own state’s animal protection ballot measures, Prop 12 and its predecessor Prop 2.

It should be considered a lucky victory — say, a splendid little WAR — that Rollins was chosen over the alternatives. Over the next four years, she’s likely to make the job for farmed animal advocates and food system reformers easier than it could have been by promoting states’ rights and free market principles to the White House and — incidentally — moving to curtail the federal government’s extensive support for factory farming. On nearly all of the largest issues facing farmed animals over the next four years, Rollins is superior to the replacement-level Republican candidate by far. While the battles are yet to be fought, a WAR has already been won.

---

1. Or so I’m told. I don’t watch baseball.