The White House is racing to combat bird flu outbreaks to contain skyrocketing egg prices as President Donald Trump blames it all on former President Joe Biden.
When asked about egg prices on Sunday, Trump blamed the flu and his predecessor.
"Well, there's a flu ... I've been here for three weeks. I have had nothing to do with inflation. This was caused by Biden. I had four years of virtually no inflation,” said Trump.
Trump’s economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, saying that he’s preparing a plan to address the bird flu outbreak with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to be presented to Trump next week.
“President Biden didn't really have a plan for avian flu. Well, Brooke Rollins and I have been working with all the best people in government, including academics around the country and around the world, to have a plan ready for the president next week on what we're going to do with avian flu,” said Hassett.
Hassett claimed that the Biden White House’s plan "was to just kill chickens.”
“The Biden plan was to just, you know, kill chickens, and they spent billions of dollars just randomly killing chickens within a perimeter where they found a sick chicken,” said Hassett, claiming that there are no eggs in grocery stores “because they killed all the chickens.”
"What we need to do is, have better ways with biosecurity, and medication, and so on, to make sure that the perimeter doesn't have to kill the chickens. We have a better, smarter perimeter,” said Hassett.
The economic adviser added that it’s “the kind of thing that should have happened a year ago, and if it had, then egg prices would be a lot better than they are now.”
“The avian flu is a real thing, and by the way, it's spread mostly by ducks and geese,” said Hassett. “And so think about it, they're killing chickens to stop the spread, but chickens don't really fly. The spread is happening from the geese and the ducks. And so, why does it make any sense to have a big perimeter of dead chickens when it's the ducks and the geese that are spreading it?”
The mass culling of chickens is required by the Department of Agriculture to limit the spread of the avian flu, which has spread to 100 million birds since 2022, according to figures from the American Farm Bureau Federation. The birds either die a natural death or are culled to avoid spreading the virus. Farmers have to report an outbreak to the Department of Agriculture, which will then cull the affected flock. Farmers are able to apply for financial assistance if they lose their birds, CNN noted.
If the egg-laying birds affected by the virus aren’t killed, it’s possible for the virus to spread, and egg prices could rise even more. If the Trump administration doesn’t change its policy, it will also take part in the mass culling of chickens.
Hassett also blamed stagflation, a mix of high inflation, unemployment, and slow economic growth, on the policies of the Biden administration.
“We found out that the stagflation that was created by the policies of President Biden was way worse than we thought. Over the last three months, across all goods, including eggs, the average inflation rate was 4.6 percent — way above target and an acceleration at the end of the Biden term,” Hassett argued.
Hassett’s comments come as the Trump administration on Friday notified laboratories in a network of 58 facilities responding to the bird flu outbreaks that a quarter of the staff in a central office coordinating their work had been terminated as part of the administration’s mass firings, according to Politico.
The National Animal Health Laboratory Network program office, which is part of the USDA, only has 14 employees, but it has a significant role in handling animal disease outbreaks. The office handles data management, making sure that labs all over the U.S. are doing the same tests and adhering to the same protocols to accurately track animal diseases.
The director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, Keith Poulsen, told Politico that the labs that are part of the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians were told that testing and other responses to the bird flu outbreak would be slowed down following the firings.
“They’re the front line of surveillance for the entire outbreak,” he told the outlet. “They’re already underwater and they are constantly short-staffed, so if you take all the probationary staff out, you’ll take out the capacity to do the work.”
