The Trump administration outlined a $1 billion effort to lower the price of eggs that centers on biosecurity efforts to curb the spread of avian influenza.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, confirmed to the post earlier this month, told reporters Wednesday morning that ensuring the highly pathogenic avian influenza, or H5N1 bird flu, does not infect egg-laying populations is critical to bringing down the costs of eggs in the long term.
“How do we lock our poultry barns down? How do we ensure that our egg-laying chickens aren’t getting this disease?” Rollins told reporters. “Mostly, it comes from wildfowl that fly over or get into the barns. So USDA will be producing, at no charge, an audit to every single egg farmer in this country, and then we will help them secure their barns.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is slated to dedicate up to $500 million to help poultry producers “implement gold-standard biosecurity measures,” Rollins wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial published Wednesday morning.
Egg prices have increased by 53% since January 2024, according to a USDA report published Tuesday. In January 2025 alone, egg prices increased nearly 14% after rising more than 8% in December.
The agency reported that over 18 million commercial egg layers were affected by bird flu in January 2025, the highest monthly total since the outbreak began taking a serious toll on North American birds in 2022.
Rollins told reporters that cutting regulations to repopulate the approximately 160 million chickens euthanized because of the virus over the past few months would be essential to bringing U.S. egg supplies in line with demand.
“So what we need to do to get regulations out of the way, to help indemnify these poultry producers, to start repopulating much more quickly than we’ve been doing,” Rollins said.
Vaccines and therapeutics to prevent avian flu in poultry will also be receiving $100 million in research and development funding, a move that industry leaders and biomedical researchers have been advocating for several months.
Rollins told reporters that although Mexico and several other countries already vaccinate their poultry against the virus, “it isn’t a proven vaccine yet.”
Vaccinating commercial birds against avian flu has been met with hesitation, in part because it makes it more difficult to export poultry meat and eggs.
“Before we start sticking our chickens, we need to ensure that, putting that into the food supply, that we know exactly what we’re doing,” Rollins said.
Rollins, a former policy adviser for President Donald Trump, was tapped in part because of the large role USDA plays in international trade for agricultural products.
During her Senate confirmation hearing, Rollins was not able to provide substantive answers about her plan for tackling the bird flu outbreak, which also began to affect dairy cattle in April of last year. She told senators that getting a better understanding of the virus would be one of her top priorities early upon confirmation.
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The administration has also been in talks with other countries regarding the short-term importation of eggs.
“We’re talking to three or four countries right now about getting between 70 [million] and 100 million eggs into the country in the next month or two, which, of course, will help supply and demand,” Rollins told reporters.