President Trump's agriculture secretary announced Wednesday that her department is working with the Department of Government Efficiency "to cut hundreds of millions of dollars of wasteful spending" that will be used to help bring down the retail price of eggs. "We will repurpose some of those dollars by investing in long-term solutions to avian flu," a major driver of the egg shortage, Brooke Rollins wrote in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. In January, the average price for large, Grade A eggs in American cities hit a record $4.95 per dozen.
The Agriculture Department will spend as much as $1 billion on the campaign, Rollins said in laying out the plan's five steps. The first $500 million is allocated to help with biosecurity measures at poultry farms—steps to stop the flu's spread. In addition, $400 million is set aside for relief to farmers whose flocks have been hit the flu, the Washington Post reports. Another $100 million will go toward developing vaccines and therapeutics for laying chickens. "This should help reduce the need to 'depopulate' flocks, which means killing chickens on a farm where there's an outbreak," Rollins wrote.
The fourth step, she said, is reducing the regulation of producers, including facilitating the raising of backyard chickens. The last move Rollins listed is temporarily increasing the number of imported eggs, possibly raising purchases from Turkey from the current 70 million a year to as many as 420 million this year, per the Post. A farmers group, United Egg Producers, welcomed Rollins' plan. The secretary wrote that while the shortage won't disappear overnight, "we're confident that it will restore stability to the egg market." (More eggs stories.)
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