Over the last two weeks, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has claimed to have the answers to increasing outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI, or bird flu) on US poultry farms and the sticker shock and scarcity many people have encountered when shopping for eggs. Her proposed solutions to record-high egg prices and a looming bird flu pandemic include a rollback of government regulation, billions in new federal spending, and even raising chickens in our backyards.
But Rollins, the Trump administration, and Elon Musk’s DOGE aren’t going to protect us from bird flu or rising consumer prices. Instead, by catering to billionaires and corporate interests, decimating federal agencies, relentlessly denying and attacking science, and refusing to learn lessons from the last pandemic, they are threatening to make this and many other problems much, much worse.
Linked to industrial agriculture, bird flu has no simple fixes
HPAI is a zoonotic disease, an infectious illness that can be transmitted between animals and humans. There are many such diseases, notably Ebola (now spreading ominously in Uganda) and the coronavirus that led to the COVID-19 pandemic, along with various bird and swine flu variants. Experts describe HPAI as a dynamic virus because it mutates frequently and circulates within and between a wide variety of animal species, including wild and domesticated birds and cats, dairy and beef cattle, rats, and many other mammals.
The latest variant of the virus that causes HPAI was first detected in wild birds in eastern Canada in December 2021. It was diagnosed for the first time in a commercial poultry facility a few months later and has since been detected in poultry in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. As of March 11, variants categorized as H5 have affected more than 166 million chickens, ducks, and other poultry. The virus has also spread in dairy cows, with confirmed cases in nearly 1,000 dairy herds across 17 states. More than 80 domestic cats, a particularly vulnerable species, have been sickened, many apparently through contaminated raw pet food. There have been 70 confirmed (and seven probable) human cases in the United States, and one death.
Raising food animals like chickens and dairy cows in overcrowded industrial conditions heightens the risk of disease outbreaks of all kinds, including HPAI. More than 81% of US egg-laying hens live in flocks of 30,000 or more birds, with the largest barns housing hundreds of thousands of hens under a single roof. These indoor facilities aren’t impervious to wild birds, mice, or other animals, and infections spread quickly in crowded conditions. Climate-driven changes to migratory bird patterns and industrial poultry’s encroachment on critical waterfowl habitat in places like the Chesapeake Bay and California’s Central Valley may also be increasing the risk of transmission between wild and domesticated birds. When outbreaks on poultry farms are detected, the quickest way to stop them is to cull (or slaughter) entire flocks, an expensive and imperfect response, and workers can still be sickened in the meantime—most of the confirmed human cases of avian influenza since 2024 have been in poultry and dairy workers.
The Rollins “plan” is incoherent and contradictory
So what’s the solution? In her second week on the job, Rollins claimed to have it, laying out her plan in a February 26 Wall Street Journal op-ed. The piece is behind a paywall, but this excerpt conveys the gist of it:
The Agriculture Department will invest up to $1 billion to curb this crisis and make eggs affordable again. We are working with the Department of Government Efficiency to cut hundreds of millions of dollars of wasteful spending. We will repurpose some of those dollars by investing in long-term solutions to avian flu, which has resulted in about 166 million laying hens being culled since 2022.
Rollins specified that $500 million would be dedicated to “helping U.S. poultry producers implement gold-standard biosecurity measures,” and that the USDA’s Wildlife Biosecurity Assessments program—launched by the Biden administration in 2023 as a four-state pilot to consult with commercial poultry producers about avian flu risks—would be offered “at no cost to all commercial egg-laying chicken farms.” She also pledged “up to $100 million in research and development of vaccines and therapeutics” for laying hens (though vaccination creates challenges in exporting to countries that don’t allow it). To address egg prices in the short term, she said the administration would pursue temporary egg import options and seek to remove “unnecessary regulatory burdens on egg producers,” specifically, California’s cage-free requirement, long a target of Big Ag.
Essentially, the plan doubles down on global industrial egg production. Or does it? Just three days after her op-ed ran, Rollins was on Fox & Friends suggesting that consumers keep backyard chickens for eggs. Critics panned that suggestion, and for good reasons. Most US consumers live in urban or suburban homes and apartments (what backyard??) and few of us have experience raising poultry. Moreover, backyard chickens kept in the open without training or biosecurity measures are uniquely vulnerable to HPAI infection from wild birds and transmitting the disease to people, making this not just a non-solution but a potential way to worsen the problem at hand.
An anti-science, pro-Big Ag administration can’t be trusted to solve this problem
It’s almost impossible to see how the measures Secretary Rollins has laid out will solve the problem. But more than that, there’s plenty of reason to believe that the Trump administration will make it worse. That’s because the administration has shown itself, in just its first couple of months, to be a deadly combination plate of anti-science and pro-industrial agriculture, with a side of absolute chaos.
Even in this anti-science administration, Rollins’ brand of science denial is egregious. Even before she was confirmed, I could see that in her record of climate denial. Then came this stunning exchange in her responses to written questions from senators considering her nomination in February:
Question: Do you believe that climate change presents a threat to American farmers and ranchers? If so, how?
Answer: We all know the climate changes throughout the year, but the cause and solutions are not widely understood or defined.
Oof. This doesn’t sound like someone we can trust to evaluate science and make decisions on any important topic, including the safety of our food supply. And Rollins’ anti-science views are all the more concerning when Elon Musk’s DOGE is also busy decimating the USDA and its ranks of actual scientists with illegal firings, harassment, and general chaos. Recall that DOGE last month “accidentally” fired staff working in various USDA agencies working on the response to bird flu before “trying” to hire them back.
Meanwhile, Rollins’ USDA is on track to be populated by Big Ag execs, a concerning proposition consistent with the Trump administration’s you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours approach to Big Oil and Big Tech. As the Union of Concerned Scientists has shown, the agribusiness industry wields enormous policy clout through its lobbying, regardless of who controls the White House or Congress. In the first Trump administration, the USDA’s leadership was stacked with former employees of Dow, the Corn Refiners Association, and other agribusiness heavy hitters, and the pattern seems to be repeating. Some of the same industry characters are cycling back into the USDA in bigger jobs than they had before: junk food lobbyist Kailee Tkacz was installed as Rollins’ chief of staff, while pesticide executive Scott Hutchins has been put forward for the USDA’s chief scientist role he was nominated for (but never confirmed) in 2018.
Of the many lessons we can take away from the COVID-19 pandemic, one is that the highly consolidated corporate controllers of our food system will jump at the chance to boost their profits while deflecting any blame for the harm they cause. The meat and poultry industry, led by Tyson Foods, lobbied the first Trump administration to keep “essential” workers on processing lines during the pandemic and lied to their workers about the risks, even as infections spread and hundreds of workers died. Then the meat processors and other food companies took advantage of pandemic disruption to raise prices and record billions in profits.
Now, as we stare down a bird flu crisis, the industrial egg industry may take center stage. By early 2023, the largest egg company was already cashing in on flu-driven shortages, with profits surging seven-fold, and a new report suggests that Cal-Maine and others may be jacking up prices. The Justice Department is investigating.
But while egg prices and related hand waving from the USDA have received a lot of attention, let’s not forget that HPAI is first and foremost a looming public health crisis. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), not the USDA, is charged with protecting people from diseases including HPAI, which means we’re relying on HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to make good public health decisions. That is not reassuring at all, given his anti-science stance on vaccination and recent echoing of fringe theories on the growing measles outbreak.
Bottom line: The idea that the Trump administration will be the ones to fix the nation’s long-simmering bird flu problem is laughable. Or it would be, if the situation weren’t so deadly serious.