Rollins Shows How to Erase the Ag Trade Deficit the Easy Way
Published: Friday, June 27, 2025
The following is from Alan Guebert, a freelance agricultural journalist from Illinois.
If you're in charge of reversing American agriculture's three-years-old-and-growing trade deficit, your list of options is as limited as it is unworkable.
You can, for instance, blame it on your predecessor, as Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins did while talking trade with Italian ag officials on June 4. "Biden's $44b (billion) ag trade deficit shrinking begins!" the secretary posted on social media as she wrapped up a trade mission to Rome.
But problems with Rollins' burst of Biden-bashing surfaced almost immediately. First, there is no shrinking U.S. ag trade deficit.
In fact, two days before Rollins' Roman declaration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's May 2025 estimate for U.S. ag trade deficit showed the deficit actually widening to $49.5 billion, or $500 million higher than the previous estimate just three months earlier.
Secondly, as Rollins was trying to saddle the last administration with this administration's problem, Politico revealed that the White House had delayed release of the bad news from its scheduled May 29 release until June 4.
The hold up, explained Politico, was because "The numbers run counter to President Donald Trump's messaging that his economic policies, including tariffs, will reduce U.S. trade imbalances."
The trouble is, of course, that's not how the world works. Tariffs encumber trade, not enhance it. Hide all the bad numbers you want but the market—reality—soon reasserts itself to prove you wrong.
The White House either didn't know that or didn't believe it. "Trump administration officials delayed and redacted" the USDA report, Politico explained, "because it predicts an increase in the nation's trade deficit in farm goods later this year ..."
When the White House finally did release the USDA report three days later, "The politically inconvenient data prompted administration officials to block publication of the written analysis normally attached to the report because they disliked what it said about the deficit."
How was that decision made in the White House? "Hey, guys, since we bungled the release of this bad report so badly, let's exclude the equally negative analysis and maybe no one will notice ..."?
Whatever the plan, it didn't work. Both Politico and DTN ag policy editor Chris Clayton asked USDA about the glaring omission. Both got the same reply: "Given the report is not statutory"—required by law—"as with many other reports USDA does, the Department is undergoing a review of all non-statutory reports, including this one, to determine next steps."
In short, the Trump administration might not issue any standing-but-not-required-by-law reports if it doesn't like what they say about White House farm and trade policy choices.
That would be an enormous, market-changing mistake, a recent USDA chief economist told Politico. "'Objectivity is really key here and the public depends on it,'" explained Joe Glabuer, a 30-year USDA veteran and now a senior research fellow at International Food Policy Research Institute.
And, he added, "'To lose that trust would be terrible.'"
Secretary Rollins, perhaps sensing the enormity of that self-inflicted mistake, moved quickly to buff USDA's fast-fading global leadership on ag policy data and analysis. On June 12, she boisterously greeted the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report.
The "... agricultural industry relies on the gold standard statistics and analysis in USDA reports," she exclaimed in a press release.
And, she added, "It is a privilege to sign this critical market report put together by the expert researchers and market analysts at USDA who work tirelessly to give farmers the market data they need to anticipate how American goods will be exported to the world."
"Gold standard statistics and analysis ... expert researchers and analysts ... who work tirelessly ... to give farmers ... data they need ..."
Exactly.
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