Cotton moves to loosen egg rules in bid to boost supply, ease affordability crunch

FIRST ON FOX: A Senate Republican wants to lower the costs of eggs by loosening certain regulations as the nation deals with growing affordability concerns.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., plans to introduce a bill that would tweak federal egg-handling rules to allow more to enter the market in a bid to lower prices of the household staple.

Cotton’s bill, the Lowering Egg Prices Act of 2025, first obtained by Fox News Digital would update federal egg-handling rules to make it easier for surplus broiler hatching eggs — fertile eggs originally intended for broiler chicken production — to be diverted into the food supply as pasteurized liquid egg products.

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“Arkansas consumers have paid higher egg prices and faced egg shortages because of bureaucratic red tape that forces farmers to throw out hundreds of millions of usable eggs each year,” Cotton said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “My bill will cut these excessive regulations and lower egg prices.”

The legislation would require that the Food and Drug Administration, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, rewrite its egg rules so that eggs intended to be hatched could also enter into the food supply as a liquid egg product, effectively creating a regulatory glide path to bolster the number of eggs in the supply chain.

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Egg prices had steadily inched upward late last year into earlier this year, reaching record highs by March of more than $6 per dozen eggs. But the cost of eggs has since been steadily dropping, thanks in part to efforts by President Donald Trump and his administration to combat the effects of avian flu.

If the virus is detected in a hatchery, the entire flock is generally killed to halt its spread. Doing so can put a dent in the supply chain, and cause prices to creep up.

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Trump ordered the USDA earlier this year to dump $1 billion into a plan to bolster the egg supply chain against avian flu, with a focus on biosecurity measures, farmer relief, vaccine research and increasing imports.

There were a spate of lawsuits against egg producers for alleged price fixing this year and notably, the Trump administration sued the state of California for allegedly going against federal law and increasing egg prices with red tape.

But egg prices have trended downward since the record highs earlier this year. According to the USDA’s most recent egg markets overview, egg prices during the first week of December dropped overall, save in some markets like California. Large white eggs, for example, dropped by roughly 17% to an average of $1.91 per dozen eggs.