The Justice Department has opened an investigation into an alleged price-fixing scheme among egg producers that threatens to keep the consumer price index pumped up and cause President Trump a great deal of trouble in honoring his campaign pledge to bring inflation down.

The probe comes after prices have doubled over the past year and eggs are sometimes entirely absent from grocery store shelves. Grocers say eggs are one of the leading drivers of food inflation over the past few months. President Trump vowed to bring down inflation once he entered office for his second term.

The investigation is in its early stages. The department sent a letter to some egg companies that instructed them to preserve documents about their pricing conversations with customers and competitors, as well as communications with Urner Barry—which is now called Expana and tracks wholesale egg-price information, some of the people familiar with the matter said. The letter also signaled the department was interested in company communications about egg production and bird flu.

If any of this sounds familiar, it is because Joe Biden did the same thing in response to rising food prices. In August 2024, Biden established a "Strike Firce on Unfair and illegal Priciing." The underlying theory was that food producers were "price gouging" to increase profits. Kamala Harris had a plan to prevent this odious behavior.

Food prices have surged by more than 20% under the Biden-Harris administration, leaving many voters eager to stretch their dollars further at the grocery store.

On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris said she has a solution: a federal ban on price gouging across the food industry.

“My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules,” Harris said at a campaign event.

Eggs have sort of become a metaphor for increasing food prices. Anecdotally, I could buy a dozen eggs for 77 cents in 2021. Now the Department of Commerce says the national average for a dozen is $4.95 per dozen, though at my local Aldi or Costco the price is between $7 and $9 and customers are limited to two cartons. Waffle House adds a surcharge to orders of eggs; see You Can't Make an Omelette: Waffle House Slams Diners With Egg Surcharge – RedState.

The primary reason for the price increase is pretty simple: We are experiencing an H5N1 avian flu epidemic in poultry flocks. Since 2022, 162 million domestic fowl, most of them chickens, have been slaughtered to prevent the spread of the disease. (You can't help but think CDC would've happily done this to Americans during COVID but had to settle for less.) Every time a chicken gets sick, the whole flock is killed. Of course, according to Grok:

• Culling Practices: In response to H5N1 outbreaks, standard protocol in many countries (like the U.S.) is to cull entire flocks—sometimes millions of birds—upon detection to prevent spread. This eliminates any chance for surviving chickens to develop and pass on natural immunity. While some studies and anecdotal reports suggest survivors could gain immunity, this potential is cut short by these aggressive containment measures.
• Lack of Natural Exposure Cycles: In wild bird populations (e.g., ducks), H5N1 often circulates as a low-pathogenicity strain, allowing birds to survive, adapt, and build immunity over generations. Domestic chickens, however, are typically raised in controlled environments with limited exposure until an outbreak hits. When it does, the virus is usually the highly pathogenic form, overwhelming their immune systems without prior priming from milder strains.

It takes about nine months for a hatchling to become a laying hen, so no drop in egg prices is in the offing until the bird flu is brought under control.

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced a five-point plan to get us back on track.

USDA has developed a successful pilot program, called Wildlife Biosecurity Assessments, to identify and implement more safety measures. Between January 2023 and January 2025, about 150 sites have undergone assessments, and producers have addressed the risks that USDA inspectors identified. Only one of these sites has subsequently been affected by avian flu. USDA will now provide this consulting service at no cost to all commercial egg-laying chicken farms. We will also pay up to 75% of the cost to repair biosecurity vulnerabilities.

Second, we will make up to $400 million of increased financial relief available to farmers whose flocks are affected by avian flu, and we will assist them in receiving faster approval to begin safe operations again after an outbreak.

Third, USDA is exploring the use of vaccines and therapeutics for laying chickens. While vaccines aren’t a stand-alone solution, we will provide up to $100 million in research and development of vaccines and therapeutics, to improve their efficacy and efficiency. This should help reduce the need to “depopulate” flocks, which means killing chickens on a farm where there’s an outbreak.

USDA hasn’t yet authorized the use of a vaccine. Before making a determination, USDA will consult state leaders, poultry and dairy farmers, and public-health professionals. We will also work with our trading partners to minimize potential negative trade effects for U.S. producers and to assess public-health concerns.

As a note, Rollins told Breitbart on an exclusive basis that has yet to appear anywhere else that a chicken vax is "off the table." Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has also said that he doesn't think a mass vaccination of poultry would be one of the two or three smartest things to do.

Fourth, in addition to tackling avian flu, we will take other actions to lower the price of eggs. For starters, we will remove unnecessary regulatory burdens on egg producers where possible. This will include examining the best way to protect farmers from overly prescriptive state laws, such as California’s Proposition 12, which established minimum space requirements for egg-laying hens, increasing production costs and contributing to the Golden State’s average price of $9.68 a dozen. We also want to make it easier for families to raise backyard chickens.

Finally, we will consider temporary import options to reduce egg costs in the short term. We will proceed with imports only if the eggs meet stringent U.S. safety standards and if we determine that doing so won’t jeopardize American farmers’ access to markets in the future.

In the meantime, we need a boogeyman: Big Chicken.

Critics also say the egg industry needs a closer look. In a letter sent on Feb. 12 to the F.T.C. and the Justice Department, Farm Action, a group that opposes corporate monopolies in food and agriculture, called on the agencies to look into potential monopolization and anticompetitive coordination in the industry.

“There’s smoke there that suggests there may be a fire underneath,” said Basel Musharbash, the principal attorney at Antimonopoly Counsel, an antitrust law and policy firm, who led the research for Farm Action’s letter. “The incentives are there, the power is there to restrain supply, and it seems like we need the F.T.C. or the D.O.J. to look and tell us if that power is actually being used.”

The group contends that the losses from culling egg-laying chickens have been “relatively modest” in relation to the size of the U.S. egg-laying flock, while producers’ profit margins have soared. According to data from Expana, which tracks the prices of eggs, roughly 15 percent of the country’s egg-laying chickens have been killed in the past four months, while wholesale egg prices in the same period have risen 255 percent.

Farm Action accuses egg producers of being slow to rebuild their flocks. How much money do you expect these companies to spend rebuilding flocks that may have to be destroyed tomorrow?

I understand the politics of inflation as well as the next guy. Though I will take second place to no man in my view of large corporations' rapacity, I don't believe they are stupid enough to connive to raise prices on this scale when everyone is focused on the issue.