As he makes the rounds on Capitol Hill this week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has forced Republican senators to confront his unorthodox views on food and health — and the fact that his opinions on agriculture are very different from those held by many Republicans.
But some senators who represent farming states — including many with concerns about Kennedy’s specific positions on agriculture — seem confident he simply doesn’t have the jurisdiction to do anything about it.
“He’s welcome to his opinions on farm policy, which I largely disagree with. But my understanding is he’s not gonna have any control over that,” Sen. Josh Hawley told NOTUS. “If I’m missing something, and he’s also being considered for like, ag czar, then I’m going to be really concerned. But he’s being considered for HHS secretary.”
Other senators seemed to agree with Kennedy’s goals on health, even when they could potentially have deleterious effects on farmers.
“He just wants to make sure that we use the right things in food,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who serves on the Senate Committee on Agriculture, said to reporters after his meeting with Kennedy when asked if he was concerned that Kennedy would seek to restrict the use of high-fructose corn syrup.
Tuberville said he would support Kennedy’s nomination.
“He’s a breath of fresh air compared to the people I’ve been dealing with in the Health Committee for the last few years,” he said.
Kennedy himself was reticent while going back and forth between senators’ offices on the Hill. He declined to answer reporters’ questions about the content of his meetings, telling NOTUS only that they were “very productive.” But in a post on X, he thanked Sen. Markwayne Mullin for “an engaging discussion” on a range of topics, including “saving family farmers.”
Mullin, a rancher, told reporters that his conversation with Kennedy included a discussion on increasing the use of animal manure as fertilizer for crops instead of chemical treatments.
“Why aren’t we using nature’s own gift for fertilizing instead of the chemicals which are getting in our streams and running down into our food supplies?” Mullin said.
Some of Kennedy’s views on agriculture may make the sector nervous: Five Republicans told NOTUS they’ve heard worries from farmers and interest groups. Kennedy’s declared war on corn syrup. He’s said that the country has “got to get off seed oils and we’ve got to get off of pesticide-intensive agriculture.” He’s expressed doubts about genetically modified crops.
In 2002, Kennedy even proposed that hog farms were “a greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network” at an event in Iowa, the country’s leading pork-producing state.
Kennedy’s positions are also a flip from President Donald Trump’s policies during his first term, which included pesticide rollbacks, ordering a simpler review pathway for GMOs to enter the food supply and slowing down food safety enforcement. If Trump allows Kennedy to “go wild,” as he said he would, it’ll mark a sharp contrast from what farmers might’ve been expecting from a Trump administration.
But some members seem to think that simply won’t happen. Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson, chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, smiled when asked about some of Kennedy’s agriculture positions. “I think he really starts to study down on health and human services, and the fact that is he’s not secretary of USDA,” he told NOTUS.
Thompson said he has been hearing from constituents in Pennsylvania on this and that he’s “tried to encourage them just to relax.”
“You know that there’s a lot that Mr. Kennedy is going to be responsible for, a lot of things to take up his time in terms of health care and pharmaceuticals,” Thompson said. For a lot of these agriculture positions, “he’s not going to have jurisdiction.”
The person who will likely have jurisdiction is Agriculture secretary nominee Brooke Rollins — who might be a comfort to members like Thompson.
She “will be an outstanding secretary of agriculture with her educational background, her family background, her passion for it, and I am so looking forward to working with her,” Thompson said.
Rollins may represent an obstacle for Kennedy’s goals on food. Kennedy’s team was blindsided by her nomination for ag secretary, The Wall Street Journal reported. Rollins, the former CEO of America First Policy Institute, doesn’t have an extensive public record on agriculture policy. But her background — she grew up on a farm in Texas and got a degree in agricultural development — suggests that she may hold more conventional views than Kennedy.
Tuberville told NOTUS he’d been hearing from farmers back home on Kennedy and that “they’re very concerned, you know, the ones that are still farming. We put so many out of business in the last three or four years.”
But he said Rollins would have “a lot of say about” the agricultural topics Kennedy talked about. Tuberville said he had spoken to Rollins and indicated that Rollins and Kennedy had also talked.
Do Rollins’ and Kennedy’s positions align on these issues? “Some do, some don’t,” he said, declining to specify further.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, another member of the agriculture committee, told reporters he planned to ask Kennedy about “pigs and GMOs, corn and that stuff” but that he’s “more concerned about what he’s going to do about shaking up the department.”
Grassley has previously said he looks at Rollins’ nomination “in a very friendly way.”
Some other Republicans are just fully bought in on Kennedy’s agenda. “We’ve changed agriculture, so we need to understand exactly what changes we’ve made,” Sen. Ron Johnson said. “We’re gonna have to first restore integrity to science, so we actually do know what the science is telling us.”
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Margaret Manto and Nuha Dolby are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.