Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins sparred with House Democrats on Thursday over the Trump administration’s deep cuts to federal funding for nutrition assistance programs and the Iran war’s economic squeeze on American farmers, at one point calling a lawmaker “rude.”
The $187 billion in cuts President Donald Trump’s marquee legislation made across the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a federal food aid program for low-income families, dominated Rollins’ fiery exchanges with lawmakers as her testimony before the House Agriculture Committee got underway.
“You and this administration have failed farmers and working Americans time after time after time,” Rep. Angie Craig, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, said in her opening statement. “You’ve also made the largest cut to food assistance in the history of our country, at a time when more and more people are struggling to afford their food.”
Since Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was enacted last July, about 3.5 million SNAP recipients have lost their benefits, according to the latest figures from the Department of Agriculture. The bill imposed stricter eligibility requirements on participants and shifted the majority of the cost responsibilities for administering the program onto the states.
Rollins argued that the cost changes to the program, which will be determined by states’ payment error rates — a measure of underpayments or overpayments of SNAP benefits to recipients — are a way to reduce “fraud” in the program.
But Craig and the committee’s Democrats challenged that argument, pointing out that the department she heads does not consider payment errors a fraud indicator.