Andres Kudacki/AP Photo
A worker grabs a chicken to slaughter inside a poultry store in New York, February 7, 2025.
The bird flu epidemic continues to devastate American flocks, both wild and domestic. Millions of chickens have been culled in an attempt to stop the spread. So far, it’s not working. Egg prices are skyrocketing, with a dozen eggs hitting a national average of more than $8, as compared to about $2.25 last fall.
Now the virus is starting to spread in dairy cattle. Beef, butter, and cheese prices might well be shooting up next. Already, several dozen people have come down with a case, and one has died. The longer it is allowed to fester and spread, the greater the chance it will mutate into a form that can be transmitted person-to-person, likely touching off another pandemic—which could potentially be much deadlier than the last one.
Blame for this can be laid directly at the feet of Trump and Musk. They took your egg, and they might take your life.
Now, there is evidence that bird flu is not affecting egg supplies as much as one might think. An analysis from Farm Action, a farmer-led activist group that focuses on antitrust issues, makes that case in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice. The egg-laying hen population has only fallen by about 10 percent, and there is suggestive evidence that the egg industry, which is heavily concentrated in only a handful of firms, is tacitly coordinating to strangle the pipeline of new laying hens so that they can keep supply low and prices high. Profits at Cal-Maine, the largest U.S. producer, have skyrocketed from about $180 million in all of 2020 to $356 million in just the second quarter of fiscal year 2025. (Panic buying is probably playing into the situation as well, as people purchase eggs en masse before the price goes up even more.)
Furthermore, insofar as bird flu is harming the egg supply, it is largely thanks to the same hyper-concentrated structure of the industry. Canada has barely been affected by the virus because its egg farms are much smaller, with an average of about 25,000 hens each. American farms typically have about two million birds, and they also tend to be packed together in nightmarishly cramped buildings. A better place for a virus to spread is hard to imagine, and any infection at a farm with two million hens will see many more deaths.
We’ve seen this movie before. It is exactly how Trump handled the COVID-19 pandemic at the start.
Obviously, Trump did not create bird flu, or coordinate the rollup of the egg industry. But he is running the government, and has many tools he could use to address the crisis. The USDA and the CDC have elaborate programs to track and stop the spread of the virus in poultry, involving the aforementioned culling, as well as testing, sanitation, or other measures. These programs worked to control the epidemic in 2022, though it later got loose again. These agencies do not have such programs for cattle, but ones could easily be stood up. Perhaps animals should be vaccinated against the virus, as Mexico is doing with hens, apparently to great effect—indeed, desperate American shoppers have been caught trying to smuggle Mexican eggs over the border.
The FTC and the Department of Justice also have antitrust tools Trump could use to try to reduce the size of egg farms, or sue farmers for illegal restraint of trade and bring prices down.
In short, this crisis is crying out for government. Securing the food supply and protecting the people from disease is what government is for. Experts, money, equipment, and so on must be organized and deployed by the only entity capable of coordinating a national effort—the federal bureaucracy.
But Trump is not doing any of that. On the contrary, he and Musk are laying waste to both the USDA and the CDC, and specifically the latter’s virus control programs. Now, however, the administration has been hurriedly trying to rehire USDA staffers illegally laid off by DOGE Muskjugend because they worked on bird flu. Hundreds of CDC staff have also been laid off; agency programs on disease study and control have been decimated or outright destroyed.
As my colleague David Dayen writes, the FTC and DOJ have not completely abandoned President Biden’s antitrust orientation, as they have in almost every other issue area. But the agencies are not filing lawsuits or starting new regulatory processes to cut (or should I say crack) Big Egg down to size. Like the rest of the administration, they are reeling under Musk’s random, illegal, chaotic cuts to departments everywhere.
We’ve seen this movie before. It is exactly how Trump handled the COVID-19 pandemic at the start: pretending it was not happening and would go away automatically, suppressing testing efforts, and complaining when journalists reported on it. As any epidemiologist can tell you, that is the worst possible approach to take. What you want is hair-trigger aggressiveness to find the virus and stamp it out as quickly as possible. The more it spreads, the harder it is to control—and if it gets loose among wild species, it will be exponentially harder still, potentially mutating to get past control systems that worked before, which seems to have happened with bird flu.
Trump’s catastrophic bungling of COVID-19’s early stages almost certainly killed tens of thousands of Americans. His catastrophic bungling of bird flu so far has only jacked up egg prices, but it could get much worse.
