Secretary of Agriculture Has Extremely Wrong Ideas About Medicaid Recipients and Ag Workers

By Dave Levitan  |  July 8, 2025 | 2:42pm
Screenshot via C-Span
Trump Administration Medicaid
Secretary of Agriculture Has Extremely Wrong Ideas About Medicaid Recipients and Ag Workers

In a Cabinet filled with ghouls actively vying for a throne atop Murder Mountain, it can be hard for figurative back-benchers like Brooke Rollins to make a mark. She is trying, though! In an event with Republican governors on Tuesday, she addressed questions about what the Trump administration’s efforts at deporting millions of people might mean for the nation’s food supply with some, uh, interesting ideas:

“I can’t underscore enough: There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way, and we move the workforce towards automation and 100 percent American participation, which again with 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.”

Setting aside what “strategic way” might entail when it comes to rounding up and disappearing millions of people, her idea that there is a Peru-sized chunk of folks just sitting at home, champing at the bit to get out into the fields is absurd. Per one Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, in 2023 about 64 percent of all adult Medicaid recipients were working full time or part time; of the rest, large percentages were not working because they were in school or due to caregiving, another group were disabled, and a small percentage were not working “due to an inability to find work, retirement, or other reason.”

By another estimate, from Matt Bruenig this year, there are less than 4 million able-bodied adults on Medicaid who work fewer than 80 hours per month — and even those still include students, among other categories. In short, someone stewed in the MAGA world’s hell spa of misinformation handed her some numbers, and she will repeat them a bunch now, until they are, for their purposes at least, as true as gospel. The historical parallels for a mass campaign of forced relocation of primarily urban residents into the fields are also worth considering; nothing good tends to follow.

 
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