Texas Tech professor Mindy Brashears, President Trump’s nominee for agriculture undersecretary for food safety, collected $100,000 as an expert witness for Beef Products Inc. in its defamation lawsuit against ABC-TV last year. The payment was part of $320,000 Brashears has earned from five companies in the past six years, said the Texas Observer, which described her as “deeply entangled with agribusiness.”
Brashears’ role in the BPI lawsuit, which challenged the network’s description of the company’s lean, finely textured beef as “pink slime,” was well known, “but the payment amounts have not been public until now,” said the Observer, a nonprofit news organization. It said ethics documents provided by Texas Tech showed that Brashears was paid more than $200,000 in consulting fees and royalties in recent years for a cattle probiotic she developed. “She’s been paid for consulting work for grain trader Cargill, pharmaceutical giant Merck, and Perdue Farms, the third-biggest chicken grower in the country, among others,” said the Observer.
“The question is what kind of bias is she coming in with here,” consumer advocate Tony Corbo said to the Observer. He said that at a minimum, Brashears “shouldn’t reap any benefit of what she’s done [for industry] while she’s a public official.” Brashears did not respond to requests for comment, said the Observer.
When it announced the nomination, the White House said that as a researcher, “Brashears’ work evaluates interventions in pre- and post-harvest environments and on the emergence of antimicrobial drug resistance in animal feeding systems, and has resulted in the commercialization of a pre-harvest feed additive that can reduce E. coli and Salmonella in cattle.” If confirmed, Brashears’ main job would be the oversight of meat safety.