Prepare for sticker shock as summer barbecue season heats up: The price of beef is sizzlingly high. Grilled sirloin will cost more than $14 a pound, on average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up 20 percent since last year.
This month, President Trump considered, and then halted, a plan to reduce tariffs on beef from some nations, including Argentina, to bring prices down. But such moves would not be enough to fix the core problem: a highly concentrated sector that has controlled our meat supply for much of the past century. More than 45 percent of all U.S. cattle passed through just 11 meat processing plants in 2025, and the top four packers sold 80 to 85 percent of all domestic beef in 2024.
In March, Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, introduced a bill to break up dominant beef-packing corporations, which include JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill and National Beef. The Trump administration, which has otherwise been allergic to regulatory enforcement against big corporations, recently announced investigations into beef packers as well as egg processors, which raised prices sharply during the avian flu outbreak, for possible antitrust violations.
But those investigations will matter only if regulators follow up on their findings with aggressive legal actions. Mr. Schumer’s bill is the kind of structural solution, with potential bipartisan appeal, that has been in short supply.
The entire U.S. food system is remarkably consolidated, exploitative and fragile. Two companies sold half of all fresh bread in 2020; two others controlled an estimated two-thirds of all baby formula in 2022; and two companies produced about 60 percent of all carrots in 2023. Result? Food prices remain elevated after rising about 30 percent between 2019 and 2025, as corporations took advantage of pandemic supply chain disruptions to raise prices and, critically, profits.
Such intense concentration was not inevitable. It’s a product of decades of failure to enforce anti-merger laws that have been on the books since 1890. Beginning with the Reagan administration, federal regulators under both Republican and Democratic presidents took a largely hands-off approach to corporate consolidation. The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission adopted Wall Street’s view that mergers generate efficiencies and promise lower consumer prices.
That was baloney. Fewer competitors often lead to higher prices. But the corporations have successfully defended their bigger-is-better argument for decades, which is one reason we have industrial pig farms polluting our countryside.
There have been many attempts to rein in the food giants. Meat, sugar and egg processors have all been accused of price-fixing, and food giants have paid out plenty in legal settlements. But antitrust enforcement has largely fallen short.
The Goliaths have maintained their grip on the markets while engaging in the same anti-consumer business tactics they have mastered. Farmers still struggle with rising costs and stagnant prices for their crops and livestock, while consumers face an illusion of choice at a higher price.
Despite the recent formation of a food antitrust task force, the Trump administration has largely gutted government capacity to take on food corporations, and it walked back some moderate steps to change harmful business practices.
Consider a federal lawsuit against Agri Stats, a data collector and consulting company that was accused of facilitating the sharing of competitively sensitive information among major meat processors and advising them on pricing. According to what one meat processing executive said in the lawsuit, Agri Stats’s advice essentially amounted to: “Just raise your price.” And they did: Turkey processing margins increased 300 percent in just three years. Citing such data, the Justice Department under Joe Biden sued Agri Stats.
The appetite for enforcement changed under Mr. Trump. This month, the Justice Department proposed a settlement that would allow Agri Stats, under court supervision, to continue to facilitate information sharing among producers in the pork and poultry industry, provided it shares that information more broadly and doesn’t distribute certain types of data related to prices and output (Agri Stats did not admit to any wrongdoing).
Solving the food sector’s woes will require much more radical medicine. It has been done before. In the 19th century, farmers being squeezed by middlemen helped pressure Congress into passing the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, which outlawed monopolies and made it a crime for competing companies to restrain trade through price- and wage-fixing or divvying up markets.
In 1920, the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department pressured the Beef Trust, a concentration of five meatpackers that then commanded as much as 75 percent of the industry, to sell off its stockyards and transportation facilities and divest from retail stores. The government also substantially reduced or prevented further concentration across the food industry through the postwar years. By 1956, the four largest beef packers, including former Beef Trust members, had just 30 percent of the market.
That all began to change in the 1980s, when the federally blessed buyout boom put big mergers back on the table; they haven’t stopped. In recent years, Brazil’s JBS bought Swift & Company as well as Cargill’s pork business; Tyson bought IBP, Keystone Foods and Hillshire Brands; China’s WH Group acquired Smithfield Foods; and the Kraft-Heinz merger created a grocery behemoth that may have, for once, become too big to even manage.
The government needs to take steps to rein in these companies. Mr. Schumer’s bill is a good start. Congress should also extend financial and technical support to help seed new competitors capable of vying with the big meatpackers, which the Biden administration attempted to do. To maintain open markets in the long run, regulators must also ban unfair business practices that can be used to secure and maintain dominant positions.
Without far-reaching change, the government, farmers and consumers will be doomed to fight an endless battle against corporate combines. Consumers will keep paying too much, and farmers will continue to get too little. By enforcing the law, Mr. Trump could deliver for the public and some of his most loyal supporters. Short of that, we need Congress to, once again, carve up this oligopoly.
Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute, which promotes economic competition. Claire Kelloway is the institute’s program manager for fair food and farming systems.
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