Democrats blame Trump for soaring egg prices — just like Trump blamed Biden. Can anyone actually fix the problem?
Most Americans know that eggs are both incredible and edible.
But now they’re political too.
As the average price of a dozen large, grade-A eggs continues to soar amid a raging bird-flu outbreak — hitting $4.13 in December 2024, up nearly 37% from a year earlier — Democrats in Congress are accusing newly inaugurated President Trump of backtracking on one of the key promises of his 2024 campaign: to “end inflation and make America affordable again,” “starting on day one.”
“I won on groceries,” Trump told NBC last month. “When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time, and I won an election based on that. We’re going to bring those prices way down.”
Yet according to a group of congressional Democrats led by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Trump has spent his first week back in office too focused on other priorities instead, such as “mass deportations and pardoning Jan. 6 attackers.”
“Your sole action on costs was an executive order that contained only the barest mention of food prices and not a single specific policy to reduce them,” Warren and 19 other Democratic lawmakers wrote Sunday in a letter to the president. “Americans are looking to you to lower food prices.”
In response, White House press secretary Karolin Leavitt continued to blame former President Joe Biden Tuesday, saying that “we have seen the cost of everything — not just eggs; bacon, groceries, gasoline — [increase] because of the inflationary policies of the last administration.”
Why are eggs suddenly the hot topic in Washington, D.C.? And what — if anything — can be done to make them cheaper? Here’s everything you need to know about the Great Egg Debate of 2025.
Trump pins egg prices on the Biden administration
Expensive eggs aren’t a new problem. Their average price hasn't been below $3 per dozen since June — and it hasn't been below $2 since the start of 2022. That’s when the current avian influenza outbreak started (which led to the death of more than 20 million egg-laying chickens in the U.S. during the last quarter of 2024 alone). Fewer chickens means fewer eggs, and fewer eggs means pricier eggs — especially as demand rises over the holiday season (all that baking) and in the lead-up to Easter (all that painting). Other factors — lingering COVID-era inflation, supply-chain issues, cage-free requirements and panic buying — have contributed as well.
All in all, the Department of Agriculture now estimates that egg prices will increase by another 20% or so in 2025, compared with about 2.2% for food prices in general.
For Trump’s 2024 campaign, eggs were the gift that kept on giving: an everyday grocery-store staple that was about three times more expensive on Election Day than it had been when Trump left office four years earlier — making it easy fodder for attacks on his Democratic rival, then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Let’s talk about eggs,” Trump’s running mate JD Vance said at a September grocery store event in Reading, Pa. “Eggs, when Kamala Harris took office, were short of $1.50 a dozen. Now a dozen eggs will cost you around $4. … Looking at the prices here, things are way too expensive and they’re way too expensive because of Kamala Harris’s policies.”
Never mind that the eggs displayed behind Vance actually cost $2.99 per dozen; the broader message connected with swing voters.
“I hope that people can get over their own feelings about tweets and things [Trump] says and look at the bigger picture with where our economy is now,” one told a New York Times focus group. “When eggs are $6 for a dozen, how many feelings do you really need to have?”
"It used to be $1, or even 99 cents," Samuel Negron, a Pennsylvania state constable, added in a BBC interview. "A lot of us have woken up, in my opinion, from Democratic lies that things have been better. We realized things were better then."
Ultimately, about nine in 10 voters said they were very or somewhat concerned about the cost of groceries, according to Associated Press exit polling.
“Grocery prices have skyrocketed,” Trump said at an August press conference. “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down.”
Prices keep rising under Trump
But the problem for Trump is that egg prices did not plummet “immediately” upon his return to the Oval Office. In fact, they have shot up to a record high of more than $7 per dozen since the start of 2025 — and now Democrats are blaming him for the hike, just like he blamed Harris and Biden.
In truth, no president can magically lower the price of eggs with the stroke of a pen. But Warren & Co. are arguing that Trump can do more to combat the bird-flu outbreak and help eventually ease prices by “encouraging competition and fighting price gouging at each level of the food supply chain.”
Not helping matters, they say, is the fact that the Trump administration has now “canceled a string of scientific meetings and instructed federal health officials to refrain from all public communications, including upcoming reports focused on the nation’s escalating bird flu crisis,” according to the New York Times.
When asked about egg prices Tuesday, Leavitt, the White House press secretary, implied that the standard biosecurity protocol of culling an entire flock after one chicken tests positive for bird flu was somehow inappropriate and might not continue in the future.
“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,” Leavitt said. “This is an example of why it’s so incredibly important that the Senate moves swiftly to confirm all of President Trump’s nominees, including his nominee for the United States Department of Agriculture.”
What’s next?
Elsewhere, the administration has pointed to Trump’s day-one executive order asking the “heads of all executive departments and agencies to deliver emergency price relief, consistent with applicable law, to the American people and increase the prosperity of the American worker.” Trump and Vance have also insisted that their plan to increase domestic energy production will eventually lower food prices.
“Rome wasn't built in a day," Vance told CBS News on Sunday. "How does bacon get to the grocery store? It comes on trucks that are fueled by diesel fuel. If the diesel is way too expensive, the bacon is going to become more expensive. How do we grow the bacon? Our farmers need energy to produce it. So if we lower energy prices, we are going to see lower prices for consumers, and that is what we're trying to fight for."
“I think that energy is going to bring [prices] down,” Trump told Time magazine last month. “I think a better supply chain is going to bring them down.”
Yet when Time asked Trump if his second term would be “a failure” absent falling grocery prices, Trump said no.
“I'd like to bring them down,” he added, but “it's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard.”