In perhaps the most ominous news of the young Trump administration, Waffle House is now charging an extra fifty cents per egg.
You’re not imagining things; at recently as late summer 2023, the average price of a dozen grade-A large eggs in a U.S. city was $2.09, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics – that’s after a spike of $4.82 in January 2023. In December, it was $4.14.
It’s become the quickest, easiest criticism of Donald Trump; on January 28, one reporter at the White House asked, “egg prices have skyrocketed since President Trump took office. So, what specifically is he doing to lower those costs for Americans?” (According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the national average price of a dozen eggs was $2.23 in mid-October, increased to $6.12 on January 17, the last full weekday of the Biden administration, and rose to $7.09 the the day the question was asked, so characterizing the price hike as occurring “since President Trump took office” is highly misleading.)
The short answer is bird flu. Way back on June 7, 2024, the Morning Jolt paused to explain the then-two separate strains of bird flu in the headlines, and to reassure people that no, this was not Covid-19 2.0. Then on December 19, the Jolt again explained that you’re most at risk if you work in the poultry industry or are handling a lot of birds, and severe human reactions to bird flu are very, very rare. And as long as you’re cooking your chicken, you should be fine.
The CDC states, “While there is no evidence that anyone in the United States has gotten infected with avian influenza A viruses after eating properly handled and cooked poultry products, uncooked poultry, and other poultry products (like blood) could have been the source of a small number of avian influenza A virus infections in people in Southeast Asia.”
But just because bird flu isn’t a serious health threat to humans, it doesn’t mean it isn’t a serious health threat to chickens. Different viruses have different effects on poultry, but in the more severe cases – “highly pathogenic avian influenza” or HPAI — the virus can kill the birds.
When a poultry producer finds bird flu in chickens, they have a strict procedure; the birds get quarantined and then culled, chickens in nearby flocks and facilities get tested, the locations get disinfected, and “the entire poultry farm is carefully tested for 21 days to confirm it is free of bird flu before allowing a new flock of birds to arrive.” The National Chicken Council assures Americans, “every broiler chicken flock in the U.S. is tested by USDA APHIS for avian influenza before the birds leave the farm.”
Since the current strain of bird flu, H5N1, reached the United States in 2022, more than 148 million birds have been ordered euthanized. That’s a lot of chickens who aren’t around to lay eggs anymore. When there is lower supply and steady or higher demand, prices go up.
There are some who argue that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has created a perverse incentive to cull flocks; USDA pays for birds and eggs that must be destroyed, but does not pay for birds that died from HPAI. USDA will also compensate farmers for “materials, such as contaminated feed or egg packaging, that must be destroyed because they cannot be safely or adequately cleaned.” USDA “pays flat rates for virus elimination activities, including barn preparation, a cleaning step, and a disinfection step.”
The point of the system is to encourage reporting of outbreaks and quick responses, which is why the USDA covers the cost of a culled bird but not a bird that dies from the virus.
Nonetheless, at the end of the year, the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service announced that it would “require commercial poultry premises to successfully pass a biosecurity audit prior to restocking if they were previously HPAI-infected and wish to be eligible for indemnity for the restocked poultry… This action is necessary on an immediate basis in order to ensure that commercial poultry producers who receive indemnity payments for HPAI are taking measures to preclude the introduction and spread of HPAI, and avoiding actions that contribute to its spread.” Those measures include buffer zones and measures to keep chickens and turkeys away from wild birds that can carry viruses.
According to the USDA, “a total of 67 unique commercial poultry premises have been infected at least twice with HPAI during the current outbreak, including 19 premises that have been infected 3 or more times. In addition, there are two non-commercial premises that have had repeat HPAI infections.”
The thinking is that by minimizing the cost and consequences of a HPAI infection to poultry producers, the U.S. federal government has made it a little too easy for a poultry producers to deal with a bird flu outbreak, to the point where not enough effort and resources are put into preventing infections.
As White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt laid out, all of these rules, regulations, and procedures predate the arrival of Trump. “The Biden administration and the Department of Agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore a lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage.”
[Insert “which came first” joke here.]