SCOOP: "This is the new USDA": Secretary Brooke Rollins, Congressman Andy Harris roll out millions in grants to tackle invasive catfish, create jobs, and fill up food banks

TILGHMAN ISLAND, Md. —

The Trump administration and Maryland’s lone Republican congressman are picking up the slack left by the Biden administration when it comes to ridding the Chesapeake Bay of one of the most invasive species of catfish. The Agriculture Secretary made her first visit of this term to Maryland for what she called “a really exciting day for the Eastern Shore.”

For decades, blue catfish have devastated the Chesapeake’s ecosystem, but now, fishermen on Maryland’s Eastern Shore are getting millions of dollars of relief from the Trump administration.

Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, joined Rep. Andy Harris (R., Md.) at Tilghman Island Seafoods to tour a fish processing facility, but more importantly, to announce $6 million in grants to local seafood processors in order to clear hundreds of thousands of blue catfish.

“This is the new USDA, where we are hyperfocused on small farms, on healthy produce, on supporting efforts like this with every dollar that the taxpayers send to the federal government,” Rollins said in response to a question from the Washington Reporter. The Trump administration will also unlock a pilot program to purchase millions of dollars of blue catfish from Maryland fishermen. Those fish will in part be distributed to local food banks, helping to both clean the bay and feed the needy.

Rollins and Harris made the announcement alongside local fishermen, delegates, and representatives of Gov. Wes Moore (D., Md.).

While the secretary said that she was not “here to castigate or throw anyone specifically under the bus,” she explained the difference between how Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden viewed the United States’s Department of Agriculture (USDA).

“What we found when we walked in to this U.S. Department of Agriculture was an organization that had basically trended away from putting farmers and ranchers and fishermen and watermen and producers first,” she said. “The careers that we work with are really grant, but leadership had really begun to move toward [woke] grants such as supporting food justice for transgender and BIPOC farmers in San Francisco and supporting research to the tune of millions of dollars, we’ve canceled over a billion dollars in grants at this point to programs like that.”

Rollins added that protecting American farmers is a matter of both food security and national security. The average age for farmers and fishers in America, she said, is around 60 years old. That, she said, is a “potential national security issue if we don’t open up the markets, increase the aperture of younger entrepreneurs…to get into this business. We will have no choice but to rely on our food from foreign nations, many foreign adversarial nations.”

Harris, a congressional appropriator, explained to the Reporter how he successfully steered millions of dollars back to his district.

“The bottom line is that the first language for these processing plants was put in the FY24 bill, it carried over in the continuing resolution to FY25,” he said. “It was $3 million in FY24, and because of the way it was worded, during the continuing resolution it carried an extra $3 million, but it didn’t get off the ground in the last administration, and it’s off the ground now.”

Harris, the Chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, did give some credit to the Biden administration for their work, which he noted ultimately amounted to a “stopgap measure.”

“I will say that the last administration did help out with programs that were in the agriculture appropriations bill that allowed extra monies for inspectors,” he said, “But look, the problem with wild-caught catfish is that it’s wild-caught. It could be caught in the morning, it could be caught at night, it could be caught on Saturday, it could be caught on Sunday, it’s not caught during business hours, which is very different from how the business operates with farm-raised catfish. So it was kind of a stopgap measure. The real solution is building the processing plants…we will have no deficit of grants…automated machines are available now to process the catfish.

State Senator Johnny Mautz, who was in attendance at the event, told the Reporter that the first step Maryland’s fishermen needed from USDA was approval to cut catfish. “USDA’s grant program is going to be a quick answer to give us a boost to increase our cutting capacity and our processing capacity, so this is a huge deal not only for the market to provide this blue catfish, but also for the fishermen who are out there who are catching the fish but didn’t have anywhere to bring them. This is going to open that market for them.”

Mautz noted that despite billions of dollars of spending under Governor Moore to clean up the Chesapeake Bay from problems like the blue catfish, “there hasn’t really been a solution” until the Trump administration came to town; the administration is “creating a fishery for the blue cat, and the State of Maryland [under Moore] hasn’t done that.”

Mautz, who owns the legendary Carpenter Street Saloon near where the event was held, explained how more blue cats on the menu benefits restaurants like his — and added that his favorite way to eat the invasive fish is as fish bites.

Delegate Tom Hutchinson, who joined for the event, told the Reporter that “it was impressive to have the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture in Tilghman Island in my District to announce $8 million in grant funding to help address the invasive clue catfish issue that is wreaking havoc on the Chesapeake Bay.”

“Secretary Rollins and Congressman Harris demonstrated to the citizens of the Eastern Shore that they truly care about the Bay and the watermen who make their livelihood on the Bay,” Hutchinson continued. “I’m excited to see more processing facilities open which will provide an economical and abundant source of protein to families and create new jobs on the Shore.”

Looking to the future, Harris explained to the Reporter that “we have been producing proteins on the Eastern Shore for a long time. Now it’s chicken; it’s going to be chicken and catfish soon.”