To make a protectionist omelet, you’ve got to break a few economic eggs.
If you don’t like that joke, just know it’s about as strained as the Trump administration’s explanations for how its trade actions are supposed to reverse the rise in the cost of eggs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average cost of a dozen eggs nearly doubled between January 2024 and January 2025.
“Donald Trump is going to bring the price of eggs down now,” said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday. “Donald Trump’s tariffs are—here’s the idea. All these other countries, like India, for instance, when Modi was in town, right, 1.4 billion people, and they won’t buy a bushel of our corn. Europe—always blocking our farmers. As our farmers can sell more and more overseas, you’re going to see the price of food in America come down. It’s a volume thing.”
Sure, Lutnick’s scrambled response doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but at least it’s consistent. The Trump administration’s answer to so many problems—from the distribution of fentanyl and the flow of illegal immigrants to the federal budget deficit and national security concerns—is to embrace tariffs. Whether these protective actions are intended as a negotiating tactic or a policy end themselves is one of the enduring questions of the second Trump administration so far. But the impulse to go to the tariff well remains strong, even when America’s trade regime has little direct influence on the problem at hand.
That certainly describes our current egg crisis. On Meet the Press, Lutnick did not inspire confidence that he even understands why prices have skyrocketed in the past year. The former financial services executive placed the blame on Joe Biden for “just killing chickens trying to worry about things.”
The “things” he’s referring to are the outbreaks of the H5N1 type of highly pathogenic avian influenza, otherwise known as bird flu, ravaging the nation’s commercial chicken flocks since last year. And Biden’s supposedly wanton and wasteful killing was actually the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s requirement to cull hens at infected facilities in order to limit the spread of the disease. Trump’s administration, by the way, is so far continuing to implement this “stamping-out policy.”
The subsequent drop in the supply of eggs (which causes prices to rise) is the predictable but devastating consequence of the bird flu outbreaks, a fact that Trump’s agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, appears to recognize. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last month, Rollins outlined what she described as her five-step plan to lower egg prices, which includes more preventative measures to stop infections from spreading and research for effective vaccines.
Notably missing from Rollins’ list was even a smidgen of lip service to the idea that taking protectionist trade action would help, though the department is in talks to increase egg imports from other countries, building on an effort begun in the Biden administration. Last year, egg imports accounted for a fraction of a percentage of the American market, so without much in the way of established trade partnerships for eggs, bringing in more eggs is proving difficult.
Meanwhile, Trump’s threats to implement reciprocal tariffs—which would see the U.S. raising tariffs on goods imported from foreign countries to match the rates those countries charge on imports to their country—could spell disaster for these efforts to shore up the egg supply with imports. That’s according to Joe Glauber, a three-decade veteran of the USDA who capped his career as the department’s chief economist. “Turkey has been a major exporter of eggs to the U.S. in recent years (over 6 million dozen in 2024),” said Glauber, who is a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Ironically, if the reciprocal tariff proposal were to go into effect, imported eggs from Turkey would become prohibitively expensive.” No kidding. Turkey’s current tariff rate for eggs is a staggering 76.5 percent.
The true answer to the egg shortage is one no populist politician wants to admit: wait for things to improve. The bird flu outbreaks are akin to a natural disaster, wiping out supply with no obvious way to quickly reverse course. Egg producers will need to replenish their laying flocks in order to meet demand, which could take several months.
Many of the proposed solutions, such as Rollins’ pledge to deploy 20 epidemiologists to “provide actionable and timely advice to producers” on how to avoid avian influenza infection, aim to prevent future outbreaks but would fail to address the current crisis. And there are tradeoffs to implementing vaccines.
“Vaccinations are controversial as they are costly, and would likely have to be constantly updated as the H5N1 virus mutates,” said Glauber. “Trading partners are reluctant to approve imports from countries where H5N1 is present and not controlled through eradication.”
But even as Rollins and the USDA tries to manage a difficult and intractable situation that threatens the president’s standing on the economy, Trump is doing his level best to wish the problem away. After tariffs and legal action (another preferred hammer for this administration), complaining about criticism is a tried-and-true Trump strategy. So over the weekend on his Truth Social account, the president shared an article with an apt headline: “Shut Up About Egg Prices.”
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