As the price of eggs reaches record highs, the federal government is looking into importing more eggs from other countries and increasing funding for efforts to combat the spread of avian flu, the Agriculture Department said on Wednesday.
The measures, announced by the department’s secretary, Brooke L. Rollins, in multiple news appearances, do not appear to deviate significantly from the Biden administration’s approach, and their effect remains to be seen.
Even as the department offered few details, Ms. Rollins said the United States was in talks with several countries to immediately secure egg imports as a short-term solution. The department will also provide up to $1 billion in additional funding, Ms. Rollins wrote in an opinion essay published on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal.
That includes distributing up to $500 million to egg producers to enhance disease prevention measures, $400 million in financial relief to farmers whose flocks are affected by the flu and $100 million toward research and development for vaccines and therapeutics.
The Agriculture Department also said it would look to minimize the elimination of flocks affected by the flu and expedite the replacement process.
The Trump administration has made clear that the skyrocketing price of eggs is a priority. “Eggs are a disaster,” President Trump said during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
Even as Ms. Rollins heralded the efforts, she cautioned that consumers should expect egg prices to continue rising in the lead-up to Easter, as demand typically increases. She said she hoped their cost would decrease by the summer.
The bird flu outbreak, which began in the United States in early 2022, is a major factor in the high price of eggs, but not the only one. Under existing federal policy, one infected bird can necessitate culling part or all of a flock. And because areas where infected birds once lived must be disinfected and quarantined, and repopulating a flock takes time, production can be halted for months.
The effect of additional egg imports on supply and prices would depend on the scale. An agency spokeswoman, speaking at a news conference, described the measure as temporary and nascent, and declined to give an estimate of how many eggs would be imported.
Bruce Babcock, an agricultural economist and professor at the University of California, Riverside, said the United States would need to import a significant number of eggs to bring down prices.
“If you really want to lower prices and use imports to do it, you need to bring in more like a billion eggs,” he said.
The Egg Producers Central Union in Turkey recently announced that it would export 420 million eggs to the United States this year. That is equivalent to the number of eggs produced in the United States in about a day and half, according to the latest estimate from the Agriculture Department.
Sourcing from overseas may also prove challenging if foreign countries do not have a surplus of eggs ready to export. Mr. Babcock said that “by the time that another country expands production to export to the U.S., hopefully bird flu will stop its destruction on the market and it won’t make sense to import eggs anymore.”
The other measures by the department build on steps taken under the Biden administration, which began projects in 2023 to assess biosecurity at poultry facilities, paid producers hundreds of millions of dollars for culling their flocks and explored vaccinating poultry.
The department spokeswoman said on Wednesday that the $1 billion in funding would come from the agency’s Credit Commodity Corporation, a pot of money that the Biden administration also used for combating avian flu.
Under the projects, wildlife technicians visited farms to identify biosecurity issues such as gaps in fencing or standing water that could attract wild birds and animals. Agriculture Department officials described the projects as highly successful and said that the agency would expand those audits and cover, for the first time, up to 75 percent of the cost of addressing identified issues.
Scientists applauded the additional funding for biosecurity enhancements and vaccine research, but cautioned that any plan should include robust surveillance.
Poultry vaccines are already being used in some countries and many scientists support them. But they have not been used as a large-scale containment measure in the United States, in part because of concerns that vaccination would imperil American exports.
Experts also noted that the overall plan said little about containing avian flu in cattle. The disease has now reached nearly 1,000 herds in 17 states. Most recently, herds have been infected with a new version of the virus that has caused severe symptoms in several individuals and the only bird flu death in the United States.
“Part of the reason for high egg prices is actually what’s happening in dairy cattle,” said Anice C. Lowen, an influenza virologist at Emory University.
Emily Anthes, Apoorva Mandavilli and Danielle Kaye contributed reporting from New York.
