USDA secretary says DOGE team has been at the agency for weeks

By Leah Douglas

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Newly confirmed U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said on Friday morning that Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency team has been operating at the agency for "a few weeks" and that she welcomed their efforts.

Rollins was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday.

Speaking at an event at the U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters, Rollins said she was proud to welcome the cost-cutting team to the agency.

"We know that that work will make us better here at USDA. It will make us stronger, it will make us faster, and it will make us more efficient," she said.

Musk, the Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect President Donald Trump, leads the Department of Government Efficiency, a new arm of the White House tasked with radically shrinking the federal bureaucracy.

Rollins said she expected full access for DOGE from all USDA teams. She also said the agency would end diversity, equity and inclusion work and identity celebrations and return all personnel to working in the office instead of from home, aligning with Trump’s executive orders.

Rollins said she was briefed on avian flu on Thursday night. The early weeks of the Trump administration have brought disruption to the federal effort to contain the spread of the virus, which has infected millions of poultry, thousands of dairy cattle, and almost 70 people.

(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington, Editing by William Maclean, Chizu Nomiyama and Matthew Lewis)