President Trump has repeatedly boasted about bringing down egg prices during his second term. He's often blamed former President Joe Biden for the recent high costs American consumers were paying for the dietary staple, claiming it was his return to office that finally put an end to runaway egg prices.
It's true that the price of eggs has declined by more than half over the course of Trump's second term. According to federal data, the average cost of a dozen eggs when he took office in January 2025 was $4.95, while the typical price this August was just $2.27.
But the reasons why egg prices have plunged so far in that time are complicated, and agriculture industry experts say the administration has taken other actions that have made it harder for farms to turn a profit.
Perhaps the single most significant factor affecting egg prices in the past five years has little to do with policy. Avian flu wiped out flocks across the U.S. and ate into domestic egg supplies, causing retail prices to take off. Prices went down again as flocks recovered.
"That's been the big factor, and it's overwhelming everything else," said Michael Walden, an emeritus professor of economics at North Carolina State University.
The Trump administration has helped farmers beef up biosecurity measures to protect their flocks, and Walden also noted that the U.S. Department of Agriculture tried to cut red tape for egg farmers. But he said Trump's tariffs on foreign trading partners and the war with Iran have made life harder for farmers by driving up their operating costs for necessities like diesel.
"While the federal government has tried to loosen some regulations on farmers to reduce costs, the benefits there have been far outweighed by the negatives," he said.
Now, as the midterm elections approach, Trump and his fellow Republicans continue to grapple with voters' concerns about affordability — in particular, the cost of food.
Avian flu batters the egg industry
Beginning in early 2022, the U.S. began experiencing its largest outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), or avian flu, in years. It resulted in the deaths of millions of egg-laying hens that year, and prices rose in the ensuing months.
A similar pattern repeated in late 2024 and early 2025, when another wave of avian flu tore through U.S. farms. According to the USDA's Economic Research Service, nearly 51 million egg-laying hens died or were euthanized between October 2024 and March 2025 alone.
A smaller flock was left to lay eggs, causing prices to surge. The cost of a dozen eggs reached a record high of $6.23 in March 2025, just two months into Trump's second term.
Consumers felt the price increase acutely. Agriculture industry experts say that's because eggs are what economists call an inelastic product, meaning demand for eggs doesn't change much when the cost goes up.
Emily Metz, president and CEO of the American Egg Board, an industry marketing group, says that's because eggs hold an indispensable place in the American diet.
"Not only are they a center of the plate item, not only do people eat them by themselves, but people also use them in baked goods, use them in drinks to froth and whip things up," she said. "They use them in all sorts of recipes and in different ways."
This past winter proved a less severe period for avian flu on U.S. farms, and farmers were able to rebuild their flocks, helping to calm last year's record prices.
How the Trump administration responded
In February of last year, after the worst of the avian flu outbreak, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced up to $1 billion to combat the disease that had swept through the nation's flocks.
It included up to $500 million to help farms enhance biosecurity protections, which include things like hygiene protocols and safeguards against wildlife, supplementing what many producers had already been doing. (The USDA had conducted biosecurity assessments at more than 900 farms as of June 2025.) As much as $400 million was set aside to pay farmers who've had to cull their flocks or destroy eggs in response to a potential infection, and the amount of compensation they could receive per bird went up.
Metz of the American Egg Board said farmers always work closely with the USDA during avian flu outbreaks, and that the plan from Rollins helped, too. But it's also true that last year's avian flu season was simply much milder.
"I think those initiatives have advanced, but we've also benefitted in the industry because bird flu is very cyclical," Metz said. "It follows the wild bird population, and so we haven't had bird flu in the environment in the same way this year that we had last year."
The USDA also said last year that it would explore ways to increase egg imports — and imports did spike. U.S. egg imports in 2025 reached 121 million dozen-equivalent, way up from the 29.8 million dozen-equivalent imported the previous year.
Mark Jordan, executive director of LEAP Market Analytics, a consulting firm specializing in animal protein markets, said that though the uptick in imports was a positive step toward replenishing the domestic supply devastated by avian flu, it had a relatively modest impact on the U.S. poultry industry, which produces around 90 billion eggs per year. "That's not nothing, but that's a small impact," he said.
Jordan said ultimately the turnaround in egg prices came from how well farms were protected from infection — and how serious that wave of illness was. "I'd say 90-95% of the impact that we've seen in terms of prices coming down has just been some measure of biosecurity success and some measure of, you know, luck," he said.
Also last year, the Justice Department along with 17 states settled a case of alleged price-fixing against three major egg producers — Cal-Maine Foods, Hickman's Egg Ranch and Versova. Prosecutors alleged that coordination among the companies pushed egg prices even higher in recent years.
Farmers hit by tariffs and Iran war
Even as the Trump administration has responded to the avian flu, it has also imposed tariffs on foreign trading partners and gone to war with Iran — both of which have surged operational costs for U.S. farmers, industry experts said.
Poultry farmers have faced "pretty stiff inflationary pressures from corn and soybean meal" to feed their flocks, Jordan said, while Metz with the American Egg Board noted that others who grow crops to feed their birds have encountered higher fertilizer costs. Transportation prices have shot up due to higher energy prices.
And egg producers have also seen higher costs for packaging, including cardboard and other corrugated materials that have been affected by U.S. trade negotiations with Canada, Metz said.
"There's a lot of inputs that go into a farm that people don't realize beyond just the animal itself, and all of those inputs have increased in cost pretty significantly over the last several years," she said.
That's put pressure not just on egg producers, but the food industry writ large, pushing up overall grocery prices for U.S. consumers. Federal data showed that grocery prices in August were up 2.2% in a year, even as egg prices declined 23% in the same period.
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