By Leah Douglas
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said during a hearing in the House of Representatives on Wednesday that new dietary guidelines developed with health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will come in “hopefully early fall”.
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are released every five years and include recommendations on what to eat for a healthy diet. They also shape federal nutrition programs.
The guidelines are drafted by committee members appointed by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services. Some nutrition experts have argued the committee members and resulting guidelines are overly influenced by food industry input.
Rollins said she and Kennedy are working on revising the draft dietary guidelines for 2025-2030 written by the administration of former President Joe Biden.
“I won’t say that we’re starting from scratch, because I think a lot of well-intentioned people did a lot of good work on that. But you’ll see by the end of this year, hopefully early fall, the new set of dietary guidelines coming out from our two agencies.”
Kennedy and Rollins have worked closely together during the first months of the Trump administration, including on nutrition and food policy issues. Rollins supported Kennedy’s April announcement that the U.S. will phase out certain food dyes.
The two secretaries have also asked states to submit waivers banning junk foods and soda from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the nation’s largest food aid program.
Rollins also said before the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture that the USDA would begin distributing $20 billion in farm aid for natural disasters in 2023 and 2024, passed last December in a stop-gap government funding package, by the end of the month.
Rollins continued to defend staff departures at the USDA when asked by committee members about how the 15,000 employee departures will affect services to farmers.
Representative Angie Craig, the top Democrat on the House agriculture committee, said on Wednesday that staffing cuts at USDA have gone “through the bone.”
Rollins said on May 6 before a Senate subcommittee that the agency does not plan to close any of its 4,500 local FSA offices that provide technical support to farmers.
Craig also said bipartisan reauthorization of a five-year farm bill is uncertain if Republicans make changes to crucial aid programs like SNAP in their party-line tax reconciliation legislation.
“When you start introducing Farm Bill titles in that kind of partisan process, that is really detrimental to the five-year farm bill negotiation,” Craig told reporters on Wednesday.
(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington, additional reporting by Bo Erickson; Editing by Franklin Paul, Hugh Lawson and Aurora Ellis)
