The Results of an Eggstraordinary Investigation

AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh

Remember when Trump and eggs were a thing?

Eggs were what frustrated, furious Democrats were going to use to bludgeon the newly inaugurated president over the head with.

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AND LOOK AT WHAT TRUMP HAS DONE TO THE PRICE OF EGGS!!!

Trump had been president barely a month when he SIDESTEPPED THE QUESTION ABOUT THE PRICE OF EGGS!

@staytunednbc When asked about the high price of #eggs at President #Trump's first #Cabinet ♬ original sound - staytunednbc

The HuffPo, while admitting egg prices weren't Trump's fault, slammed an article by the late Charlie Kirk telling people to chill out for a minute, because Trump had said he'd start to bring prices down 'Day One.' Here it was a whole month and a half later!

Trump had failed the 100% literal interpretation immediate gratification test only Republicans are held to.

'Shut Up About Egg Prices': Trump Shares Brazen Message About High Costs

The president posted a column from conservative activist Charlie Kirk telling people to stop complaining about egg prices.

...In the column published by The Daily Caller, Kirk argues that egg prices are not Trump’s fault.

They’re not. At least, not entirely. Prices have been see-sawing since 2022, with much of the increase since due to the impact of bird flu, which has killed millions of chickens. Millions more have been culled to stop the virus from spreading.

However, Trump campaigned heavily on not just cutting prices, but doing so on his very first day in office.

GAWD, they're exhausting.

Memes abounded, and even FactCheck.org pushed their oversized nosy schnozzes into it two months later, in an April 'Trump's lies lay big fat expensive eggs' update..

Trump’s False Claims about Gas, Egg Prices

...Contrary to what Trump claimed, average retail egg prices paid by consumers were still increasing last month, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data that is publicly available. In March, the nationwide average price for a dozen grade A white eggs was about $6.23 – up 5.6% from $5.90 in February, and up 25.7% from $4.95 in January.

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Lucky thing they got that crack on the president in, because the very next month CNN had to admit that egg prices had gone sunnyside up. But noted that they were still 'much higher than before.'

For months, President Donald Trump has falsely claimed that egg prices are tumbling. It wasn’t true then, but it’s true now.

Egg prices fell 12.7% last month, the biggest monthly decline since 1984, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. And they could continue to fall this month, too: The USDA reported last week that a dozen large white-shell eggs now cost $3.30 on average, down a whopping 69 cents from a week before.

It’s a remarkable reversal after egg prices surged in each of the past five months – and 17 of the past 19 months – because of a deadly avian flu epidemic that necessitated the mass culling of egg-laying hens.

Maybe the worst of EggGate has passed,” Tyler Schipper, associate professor in economics and data analysis at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, told CNN.

CNN had a bad case of sour eggs.

...The USDA says consumer prices finally fell as demand for eggs decreased and avian flu cases have fallen. Many groceries, including large chains like Costco, had limited customers’ purchases because of egg shortages.

So Trump’s claim that consumer egg prices are down is finally true – even if the timing of his claim and the wild percentages he threw around were grossly inaccurate.

You can clearly see the second spike begin at the start of 2024, peaking in the first quarter of 2025, in this chart from Axios.

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At the same time that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was instituting new programs and investing in things like new 'biosecurity measures' at egg-producing farms, the Department of Justice under Pam Bondi quietly started an investigation into egg producers themselves. Why exactly were egg prices still so high when the avian flu threat seemed to have been handled expeditiously, and demand wasn't exceeding available product?

Was something else artificially inflating prices?

Inquiring minds wanted to know.

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the cause of soaring egg prices, including whether large producers have conspired to raise prices or hold back supply, according to people familiar with the matter.

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.

It couldn’t be learned whether the probe is under the direction of civil or criminal authorities.

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And everyone's forgotten about eggs, especially as they have come down. We all knew they would, so who cares, right?

Well, thank goodness the DoJ cared because you'll never guess what their little nosing around the egg industry - which was no doubt characterized in many quarters as theater for Trump not getting prices down - turned up.

A corporate shell game, if you will, and the cost to consumers of that collusion was no yolk.

Big egg producers settle price inflation probe with DOJ for 53 million eggs — and $3.3M

The Department of Justice and 17 state attorneys general reached a $3.3 million settlement with three of the nation’s largest egg producers for alleged price manipulation that “artificially increased” egg prices for consumers and retailers, federal and state officials said Monday.

The egg producers — Cal-Maine Foods, Versova and Hickman’s Egg Ranch — also agreed to donate about 53 million eggs combined to food banks or related non-profits as part of the settlement.

Based on the current average price of a dozen large Grade A eggs — about $2.19 per dozen — those eggs could be worth roughly $9.7 million at the retail level.

The DOJ and state coalition alleged the companies “illegally coordinated” over nearly three years to inflate a daily price index for eggs, citing the results of an investigation into egg-price collusion that began more than a year ago.

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They had these eggxecutives caught dead to rights.

...Egg companies significantly hiked prices in 2022 and again in 2024 and 2025 after a severe supply shortage that the industry attributed to avian flu. Prices hit a record high of more than $6 a dozen at grocery stores in the spring of 2025. 

Antitrust enforcers said the companies worked to rig the benchmark price from 2022 to 2025. Executives spoke by phone and sent text messages to each other urging how they should nudge prices higher by “posting strong bids, early and often.” An executive of an egg cooperative, unnamed in the court complaint, said the group should “bid like they vote in Chicago, early and often.”

The companies also coordinated off-exchange egg trades at premium prices, which were submitted to the middleman that tallies the benchmark price.

...Executives from Cal-Maine Foods, Hickman’s, and Versova spoke of the phone phone and messaged to coordinate bids and trading on eggs.

While these producers blamed avian flu, they were actively and illegally collaborating to keep the price of eggs high.

Naturally, the companies all deny any wrongdoing, and one of them said that the communications in the complaint, turned over to investigators by an ex-employee, didn't affect egg prices.

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Justice begs to differ.

...The Justice Department and multistate coalition alleged that Cal-Maine, Versova and Hickman’s “secretly communicated” from approximately June 2022 to March 2025 to influence the daily egg price quotes published by Urner Barry, which has an egg-pricing benchmark “widely used in egg supply contracts,” according to New York Attorney General Letitia James.

EGGZACTLY

So food banks and charities are getting truckloads of eggs, I guess the states split the cash, and egg prices are down close to normal. 

But now we know they probably would have been at that point sooner had there not been some bad eggs at work.

I'll be here all week.

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