For weeks, President Trump has repeatedly boasted that his administration had managed to bring egg prices down. But new data on Thursday showed that egg prices at the grocery store continued to climb in March.
Egg prices rose 5.9 percent over the month, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They climbed at a slower rate, though, after rising 10.4 percent in February and 15.2 percent in January.
Compared with a year earlier, egg prices are up 60.4 percent.
Egg prices have reached record highs in recent months as bird flu outbreaks have hit poultry farms and forced producers to cull tens of millions of hens. But Mr. Trump, who had vowed to bring down grocery prices while on the campaign trail, has continued to claim victory on egg prices. This month, Mr. Trump said that egg prices had dropped 59 percent, and on Monday, he said that egg prices were down 79 percent.
Consumers might not be feeling relief because the president is not referring to retail egg prices. He is instead pointing to the wholesale price of eggs, which has fallen by roughly half since the beginning of his second term.
Wholesale egg prices dropped from a national average of $6.55 a dozen on Jan. 24 to $3.26 on April 4, according to data from the Agriculture Department. Wholesale egg prices are also down from a peak of more than $8 a dozen at the end of February.
But the average retail price for a dozen large eggs reached $6.23 in March, up from $5.90 the month before, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
It could take several weeks for the decrease in wholesale prices to pass through to retail prices, said David Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State University. “All indications are that there’s some relief coming for consumers,” he said. “Even then, there are a lot of other factors that determine the price of eggs.”
Wholesale egg prices have come down significantly as poultry farms report fewer bird flu outbreaks, supply has increased and consumer demand has weakened, economists say. But it is difficult to know exactly how much retail egg prices could come down. New avian flu outbreaks could continue to put pressure on egg prices. And even though a drop in wholesale egg prices typically translates to lower prices at the grocery store, retailers do not necessarily have to pass all of the savings to consumers.
“They don’t have to lower it all the way to reflect how much the price really fell in the wholesale market,” said Christopher B. Barrett, an agricultural economist at Cornell University.
In response to high egg prices, the Trump administration said late last month that it had expanded biosecurity assessments to prevent further outbreaks and was working on reducing regulatory barriers to boost supply. Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that the administration’s work to combat bird flu had “paid off” and that officials were “carrying out their mandate to ‘Make America Wealthy Again.’”
Madeleine Ngo covers U.S. economic policy and how it affects people across the country.
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