Happy Easter Friends! Let’s reclaim the factual high-ground: The Price of Eggs
If we cherry-pick, any of us can make the price of eggs mean something grand. Like how-well-the-country-is-being-run grand.
On April 2 Donald Trump was praising his Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins when he said that she had brought down the price of eggs by 59%. The decrease wasn’t because of Rollins (more on that below), but his math was correct if you compared the wholesale price of eggs on April 2 to their peak price the month before on March 3. Then he started to go off the rails, saying on April 7 that egg prices were down 79% and on April 8 and April 9 that they were down 87%. Those later statements don’t math.
On the other side of the aisle, there are entire Tik Tok accounts dedicated to showing the price of eggs in the grocery store, with the tone being that anyone who voted for Donald Trump is an idiot because egg prices are still not under $2 per dozen.
I wanted an easy way to check the facts.
Over the holidays it was bird flu combined with seasonal demand. Now it’s just bird flu.
Initially I thought that inflation would affect the price of eggs in some way. But after plotting the price of eggs adjusted to today’s dollars over the past 45 years, I’ve proven to myself that isn’t the case:
If the price of eggs and inflation were intimately connected, the line above would be relatively flat. But egg prices have both increased and decreased against inflation by almost 100%. (On a smaller scale, each of the small spikes on the line marks another year of baking cookies between Thanksgiving and Christmas.)
But the big issue is the parts of the line that I’ve colored red. Those time periods all correspond to outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). HPAI gruesomely kills birds, and the death of egg-laying hens and pullets (young chickens that will grow up to become egg-laying hens) directly affects the price of eggs. Documented HPAI outbreaks in 1983-84 and in 2014-2015 both caused sudden and obvious 50% jumps in the price of eggs. The current outbreak began in 2022, is ongoing, and in December 2024 and January 2025 alone it caused the death of 33 million hens, approximately 10% of the US commercial egg-laying flock.
The Trump administration has made two moves to decrease the price of eggs, both of which have a moment-of-zen quality:
The US has increased imports of fresh eggs tenfold over the past two months. Turkey (10% tariffs) and Mexico (25% tariffs) have become our biggest import sources. 💰
Agriculture Secretary Rollins has announced a $1 billion dollar effort to combat bird flu. It includes $100 million dollars to develop a poultry vaccine. 💉
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