Brooke Rollins, Corporate America’s Favorite Mole Within MAGA
This column has been focused on culture lately, including pop culture, but I’m not sure how much more I can write about Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter before people start calling for it to be pulled. So, I’m going to write about a different kind of lady: Brooke Rollins, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture and the co-founder of the America First Policy Institute.
Rollins is like the political lobbyist version of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 Terminator. She clawed her way out of Texas, where she was a political operative and leader of a conservative-libertarian policy shop, latched onto the America First brand, and, through hard work, ruthless cunning, and remarkable efficiency, has grasped onto power within two Trump administrations.
Unfortunately for supporters of Donald Trump, Rollins’ success is mostly bad news. Albert Einstein supposedly defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. Thus, it may seem like I’m losing my mind writing about Rollins again, which I stopped doing years ago when it became apparent that nothing I wrote would make a difference. Now I’m revisiting her with both a sense of weariness and the sane expectation that it won’t matter this time, either.
A key player in many policy putsches, Rollins has served as a mediator between powerful lobbies and the White House. From soft-on-crime initiatives to immigration schemes that favor those whose bottom lines are padded by cheap labor, Rollins has managed to frame all of these betrayals as somehow in keeping with the principles of “America First” and “limited government.” Rollins’ latest push is for immigration amnesty by another name.
Rollins got her start working in the office of Texas Governor Rick Perry as his general counsel, ethics advisor, and policy director. There, she built up a Rolodex of political contacts that served her well when she undertook her next big gig: leading the state’s prominent conservative think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), from 2003 to 2018. The book Perry wrote to promote his 2012 presidential campaign, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, was published under TPPF’s copyright, and the foundation and the former governor formed a mutually beneficial relationship. TPPF’s policy wonks gave Perry intellectual support for his positions, while Perry, as George W. Bush’s Secretary of Energy, helped the foundation evolve from provincial obscurity into a bullpen for future Republican administrations.
TPPF boasts in its mission statement that it “does not accept government funds or contributions to influence the outcomes of its research.” That’s true. Instead, its research is funded and influenced by corporations and billionaires. But don’t take it from me. Melinda Hasting, TPPF’s former vice president, admitted as much after she left the organization and said goodbye to the conservative movement. She told The Texas Observer that a typical pitch to the deep-pocketed goes like this:
We think this is beneficial to your industry and would you consider providing us with a non-profit contribution. … Here’s the timeline for the completion of the research; the parameters of the research are this; we expect it will result in some savings or outsourcing.
As an example, Hastings cited the time that TPPF published a study called “Sundown on Big Government” in 1997. It claimed that a dozen or so state agencies could save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars through privatization and outsourcing. Some of TPPF’s proposals were ultimately adopted. Despite the media buzz the report generated, few people were aware that it had been funded by the Associated General Contractors of Texas and the Consulting Engineers Council of Texas—organizations that stood to benefit from the outsourcing of government functions to contractors and engineers in the private sector.
The success of “Sundown” was a coup for TPPF and its donors. In a statement to the press, Josh Treviño, then the vice president for communications at TPPF, did not deny Hastings’ account and broader criticisms. He only offered that things changed under Rollins, who he said would never work with special interest groups like that. In reality, it got worse under her leadership.
Rollins is a gifted and charismatic communicator who puts those skills to work in the service of her donors. The Texas Observer reported on a list of TPPF’s donors that was inadvertently posted online, which showed that by 2012 the organization was receiving most of its funding from a small constellation of major corporations—Boeing, Verizon, State Farm, and ExxonMobil, among others—and wealthy individuals, such as the Koch brothers. The Kochs’ network of institutes and advocacy groups has long worked to push the Republican Party in the direction of progressive prison reform while attempting to soften Trump’s immigration restriction agenda, which it considers bad for corporate labor costs.
With Rollins at the helm, and as part of its Koch Industries-funded Right on Crime campaign, TPPF spearheaded reform efforts that led to Texas closing eight prisons even as violent crime has ticked up in recent years within the state’s major cities of Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. In a 2015 conference hosted by the Kochs, Rollins proclaimed with the fervor of a preacher that the soft-on-crime revolution TPPF led in Texas would soon go nationwide. “Now, we will begin to change the world, state by state, country by country, to put together what has been broken,” she said.
Three years later, Rollins found herself sitting beside Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in the Roosevelt Room. According to Politico, Kushner lobbied Rollins to join the administration and lead its criminal justice reform efforts. Within a month, she was running the Office of American Innovation, which was created by Kushner in 2017. Kushner envisioned it as a “limitless, around-the-clock [policy] shop that knows how to get things done,” Rollins told RealClear Politics in 2022. In practice, it worked more like a conduit through which special interest groups could work their influence in the White House.
One instance occurred early during the first Trump administration, when the administration was considering reviewing and potentially restricting the H-1B immigrant work visa program. Sources told Recode that “Kushner convened [Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos] and other executives as part of his tech-focused efforts with the White House’s new Office of American Innovation” to undermine the H1-B review.
Kushner and Rollins would go on to collaborate on a criminal justice reform bill that was passed as the First Step Act. In truth, however, it is Rollins who deserves the credit, as the bill was largely inspired by the policies she had implemented in Texas while leading TPPF. The First Step Act made it easier for hardened criminals to secure early release from prison. A number of high-profile violent crimes—including killings—have since been committed by the recidivists who benefited from the bill. In 2023, a staffer to U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was stabbed by a man who had been released on “good time credit” provided by the First Step Act. The man has since been ruled mentally unfit to stand trial. The law also included leniency for maritime drug traffickers.
After leaving the White House, Rollins established the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), which launched in 2021 with a massive, $20 million war chest. Far from being truly “America First,” AFPI was just the D.C. version of TPPF, and served as a source of personnel for the second Trump administration.
Today, Rollins is still doing the bidding of special interest groups from her perch in Washington. A February report by Business Insider revealed that nearly two dozen industry lobbyists, corporate executives, and trade association leaders have selected Rollins and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as their tools for getting concessions on immigration, and for getting around immigration hardliners like White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. Both Rollins and Noem “are longtime business advocates, and Noem served as governor of South Dakota, home to migrant-dependent industries like beef processing and dairy.”
Rollins has been careful to avoid the term “amnesty,” given that she was implicated in a push for amnesty during the first administration and has been on record supporting the increase of visas for foreign laborers. In Rollins’ spin, it’s about “backing the farmers.” The mass deportations of illegals would continue, but be directed toward “big cities.” The industrial agriculture and food processing industries that employ illegal immigrants mostly in rural areas, however, would be protected from deportations that could disrupt their operations. As it turns out, TPPF published a report in 2016 that concluded the problem of illegals in the U.S. food system could be “solved” by legalizing them through an expanded the H-2A foreign agricultural worker program:
It is reasonable to hypothesize that an expanded temporary worker visa program with a reduced regulatory burden on employers could make a significant contribution in decreasing the number of unauthorized persons attempting to reside permanently in the United States.
Unfortunately, Trump has repeatedly made statements in support of this idea. Notably, he has not yet put enforcement teeth behind the national E-Verify system, which is supposed to make sure that employers aren’t hiring illegals. If it were rigorously enforced, E-Verify would go a long way toward moving America away from its addiction to exploitative labor practices. Instead, the public gets performative shows of force from ICE agents while the administration tries to cut some slack for corporate interests behind the scenes. Rollins is just the woman for that job. ◆