Tag: usda

US To Open Fly Production Facility For Combating Mexican New World Screwworms

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins launched a facility in South Texas on Wednesday that will release millions of sterile flies to fight the threat of flesh-eating parasites that are infecting cattle in Mexico and could reach the U.S. border soon, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) said in a June 18 statement.

The parasite, New World screwworm (NWS), is a “devastating pest that causes serious and often deadly damage to livestock, wildlife, pets, and in rare cases, humans,” the USDA said. Some U.S. agriculture and cattle industry officials are worried that if the migration isn’t checked, the NWS flies could reach the border by the end of summer.

According to the agency, NWS females lay eggs on wounds or orifices of warm-blooded animals. Once the eggs hatch into larvae, they burrow into the wound and feed off the flesh. As more maggots hatch and feed, the wound becomes deeper and larger. Eventually, it becomes so severe that the host animal dies.

A single female NWS fly can lay up to 3,000 eggs over its lifespan. As such, a large infestation poses considerable risks to farmers raising cows, sheep, and other animals.

In the 1950s, a strategy called sterile insect technique (SIT) was developed, which was used to eradicate NWS from the United States, Mexico, and Central America, the USDA said in an April 2025 document. SIT used gamma radiation to turn NWS pupae into sterile male flies.

When the male flies are released en masse, they mate with wild female flies who end up laying unfertilized eggs, eventually leading to the eradication of these pests.

“While NWS has been eradicated from the United States for decades, recent detections in Mexico as far north as Oaxaca and Veracruz, about 700 miles away from the U.S. border, led to the immediate suspension of live cattle, horse, and bison imports through U.S. ports of entry along the southern border on May 11, 2025,” said the USDA statement.

The facility launched by the agriculture secretary is an $8.5 million sterile NWS fly dispersal site located at Moore Air Base in South Texas.

The United States currently can procure 100 million flies per week from a sterile fly production facility in Panama. The USDA has invested $21 million in a production facility in Mexico that, when operational, will provide another 60-100 million flies weekly. Combined, at least 160 million flies per week are expected to be available for disbursal through the Moore Air Base facility.

In addition, the USDA is also looking at installing a sterile fly production facility at Moore Air Base to complement the new dispersal facility.

“The United States has defeated NWS before, and we will do it again,” said Rollins. “We do not take lightly the threat NWS poses to our livestock industry, our economy, and our food supply chain.

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Civil rights watchdog threatens to sue USDA for continuing to discriminate against white farmers

Acivil rights watchdog has threatened to sue the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for continuing to discriminate against white farmers despite the new secretary rescinding some of the agency’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives a

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) said it might take legal action against USDA Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins over the matter as new whistleblower allegations come to light 

According to the Washington Examiner, whistleblowers have accused the agency of providing loan relief under former President Joe Biden based on race.

“We appreciate the Trump Administration’s strong stance against DEI, but Secretary Rollins must take the discrimination at USDA much more seriously,” WILL’s managing vice president and deputy counsel Dan Lennington said in a statement. “If she doesn’t, we will hold her accountable very soon in federal court. She has received fair warning from WILL and Congress.”

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USDA Whistleblower Says Biden Regime Secretly Crushed White Farmers by Only Paying Off Farmer Loans if They Were Not White Males

A whistleblower from the Department of Agriculture told NewsNation that the Biden Administration loan relief program purposely hurt White farmers.

The Biden Regime, through the ‘American Rescue Act’ used $800 million in taxpayer money to secretly give loan forgiveness to minority farmers.

“It’s not right,” the USDA whistleblower told NewsNation. “It was discriminatory. Unethical. And the people who pushed it are still in charge of the agency … (those) at the national office. Trump hasn’t gotten rid of them.”

“So just to be clear, if you were American Indian, Alaskan, Native, Asian, Black, African American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Hispanic, or Latino and you were in that group and you were told you didn’t have to pay your bills?” NewsNation asked the whistleblower.

The whistleblower said, according to the American Rescue Plan, the relief was offered up to 120% loan to value which means the farmers could claim they were upside down to get even more cash!

“Essentially, yes, that’s correct. And that your loan would be forgiven up to 120% of the loan value,” the whistleblower said.

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Trump agency uncovers ‘one of the largest’ food stamp fraud, bribery schemes

A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employee and five others are under arrest as of Friday morning, after allegedly misappropriating tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer food stamp funds.

“At [the] USDA, we are hyper-focused… on rooting out that waste, fraud and abuse, and… yesterday was, if not the largest, one of [the] largest stings,” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said Friday on “Mornings with Maria.”

“This is a new day, and President Trump promised, as he was traveling across the country over the last few years,” she continued, “that it would not be the government that we know.”

With the assistance of the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office, six individuals have been criminally charged with a bribe and fraud scheme that generated more than $66 million in unauthorized transactions under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps.

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Pigford, Again: Biden’s USDA Allegedly Excluded White Farmers from Loan Forgiveness

The Biden administration allegedly discriminated against white farmers in loan forgiveness, according to a whistleblower — a repeat of the Pigford scandal of 2010, with Tom Vilsack again in charge of USDA.

The Pigford scandal was exposed by Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart, who noted that left-wing organizers had exploited the real grievances of black farmers to conduct a covert “reparations” program.

The original Pigford settlement was reached by the Clinton administration. In 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama used the promise of wider compensation to woo rural South Carolina voters.

That promise, Breitbart alleged, was key to Obama’s insurgent win against party favorite Hillary Clinton.

Though Breitbart struggled to force the mainstream media to pay attention, the New York Times eventually vindicated his investigative reporting, a year after his death, showing how Pigford became a massive fraud:

[T]he Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.

…

From the start, the claims process prompted allegations of widespread fraud and criticism that its very design encouraged people to lie: because relatively few records remained to verify accusations, claimants were not required to present documentary evidence that they had been unfairly treated or had even tried to farm. Agriculture Department reviewers found reams of suspicious claims, from nursery-school-age children and pockets of urban dwellers, sometimes in the same handwriting with nearly identical accounts of discrimination.

…

The groups found a champion in the new agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack. New settlements would provide “a way to neutralize the argument that the government favors black farmers over Hispanic, Native American or women farmers,” an internal department memorandum stated in March 2010.

Now, another whistleblower has come forward to accuse the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) of racially discriminatory fraud once again.

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Privacy and hunger groups sue over USDA attempt to collect personal data of SNAP recipients

Privacy and hunger relief groups and a handful of people receiving food assistance benefits are suing the federal government over the Trump administration’s attempts to collect the personal information of millions of U.S. residents who use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

Privacy and hunger groups sue over USDA attempt to collect personal data of SNAP recipientsBy REBECCA BOONEAssociated PressThe Associated Press

Privacy and hunger relief groups and a handful of people receiving food assistance benefits are suing the federal government over the Trump administration’s attempts to collect the personal information of millions of U.S. residents who use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

The lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., on Thursday says the U.S. Department of Agriculture violated federal privacy laws when it ordered states and vendors to turn over five years of data about food assistance program applicants and enrollees, including their names, birth dates, personal addresses and social security numbers.

The lawsuit “seeks to ensure that the government is not exploiting our most vulnerable citizens by disregarding longstanding privacy protections,” National Student Legal Defense Network attorney Daniel Zibel wrote in the complaint. The Electronic Privacy Information Center and Mazon Inc.: A Jewish Response to Hunger joined the four food assistance recipients in bringing the lawsuit.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, is a social safety net that serves more than 42 million people nationwide. Under the program formerly known as food stamps, the federal government pays for 100% of the food benefits but the states help cover the administrative costs. States also are responsible for determining whether people are eligible for the benefits, and for issuing the benefits to enrollees.

As a result, states have lots of highly personal financial, medical, housing, tax and other information about SNAP applicants and their dependents, according to the lawsuit.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order March 20 directing agencies to ensure “unfettered access to comprehensive data from all state programs” as part of the administration’s effort to stop “ waste, fraud and abuse by eliminating information silos.”

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USDA ends ‘maximum pain bird flu gain-of-function experiments’ with Wuhan lab parent

The U.S. Department of Agriculture canceled its $1 million collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the parent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to conduct gain-of-function experiments on bird flu viruses, Secretary Brooke Rollins told Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va.

Speaking at a House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, Rollins said “it is my understanding that those [experiments] have been discontinued just in the last few months” when Cline asked for their status, started in the Biden administration, and that if she’s wrong, “then 100%, yes,” USDA will stop them.

Cline said her predecessor Tom Vilsack “defended and distorted this risky research” when Vilsack testified, denying it was a “collaboration” even though the “project title” calls it that and claiming there was no “data sharing” even though public records show USDA visiting the China lab to “share results on site.” The Chinese researcher lists the Wuhan Institute of Virology as an affiliation, Cline said.

“It is outrageous that U.S. taxpayer dollars were ever used by the Biden USDA to fund joint experiments with the Chinese Communist Party, especially research that could be catastrophic if mishandled or weaponized,” Cline said in a statement.

The White Coat Waste Project, which exposed through public records requests the five-year project on what it called “maximum pain bird flu gain-of-function experiments” on birds as young as a day old, cheered Rollins’ declaration.

“Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for the creation of pandemic-causing pathogens, and now, following a White Coat Waste campaign, they won’t have to,” President Anthony Bellotti said.

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USDA Trade Committee That Promotes Hemp Internationally To Be Closed Under Trump Executive Order

The Trump administration is moving to terminate trade advisory committees under the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), including one that had been expanded to include hemp industry representatives to promote the crop internationally.

In a notice published in the Federal Register on Monday, USDA advised that it will be going forward with the termination of the committees in compliance with an executive order President Donald Trump signed in February that’s meant to reduce the size of the federal government across multiple agencies. The plan has been paused, however, as USDA is now asking the White House to advise on how to most efficiently facilitate the terminations.

This means the Agricultural Technical Advisory Committee (ATAC) for Trade in Tobacco, Cotton, Peanuts, and Hemp—among six other committees focused on different crops—will be shuttered. 

“It’s certainly a concern,” Jonathan Miller, general counsel at the U.S. Hemp Roundtable, told Marijuana Moment on Wednesday. “You know, the irony has been, for the past decade, we’ve wanted to be treated like every other commodity—and we got that when it comes to this commission. Now, with this broad focus we’re potentially being penalized.”

However, he said that in light of certain policy reversal amid the Trump administration’s efforts to cut spending, he remains “hopeful” that after a review, there will be “a real focus going forward on what’s meaningful and what’s not. And we think this is a meaningful program.”

The ATAC didn’t always have hemp in its title, nor representatives of the industry. But following the federal legalization of low-THC forms of the cannabis crop under the 2018 Farm Bill that Trump signed into law during his first term, USDA got to work incorporating hemp into its various policies and programs, which included its elevation within the ATAC in order to encourage international trade deals.

USDA and the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) have been gradually building up hemp industry representation within the ATAC. The first members were appointed in 2020, and the most recent joined this January, shortly before Trump took office for the second time. The name of the ATAC was changed to explicitly include hemp in 2023.

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USDA Approves Nebraska’s Banning Soda and Energy Drinks From Food Stamps

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins issued a waiver on May 19 restricting the use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds to buy soda or energy drinks in Nebraska, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said in a May 19 statement.

This is the first-ever state waiver banning soda and energy drinks from SNAP, popularly known as food stamps.

“Prior to this waiver, SNAP recipients could buy anything except alcohol, tobacco, hot foods, and personal care products,” said the statement.

The waiver, which takes effect on Jan. 1, 2026, is part of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, the USDA said, adding that this “historic action seeks to reverse alarming disease trends across the country.”

One in three children between the ages of 12 and 19 is affected by prediabetes, it said. Forty percent of school-aged children and adolescents suffer from at least one chronic condition, while 15 percent of students in high school drink a minimum of one soda per day.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in February establishing the President’s Commission to Make America Healthy Again. The agency is tasked with investigating the “root causes of America’s escalating health crisis,” including chronic disease among children, according to a White House fact sheet.

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Lawmakers Call On USDA To End Biden Era Discriminatory Policies Against White Farmers

Wisconsin’s Republican House delegation is calling for an end to Biden-era programs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture that discriminate against white male farmers. The holdover initiatives that, among other things, offer better loan terms to so-called “socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers” are at the core of civil rights legal battles four-plus years in the making. 

In a letter exclusively provided to The Federalist, the lawmakers urge Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to investigate the case of Adam Faust. The disabled Wisconsin dairy farmer “has been subjected to protected class-based discrimination by USDA … ineligible for certain USDA programs” because he is white and a man, the letter asserts. 

“President Trump has taken bold and decisive action to eliminate racially discriminatory policies within the executive branch,” the congressmen — Reps. Tony Wied, Derrick Van Orden, Tom Tiffany, Bryan Steil, Glenn Grothman, and Scott Fitzgerald — remind the Ag secretary. “Agencies, including USDA, have been ordered to terminate all race-based programs and regulations. USDA should comply with President Trump’s order immediately. Each day without reform further disadvantages farmers, like Mr. Faust, based on their immutable characteristics.”

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