President Donald Trump and Republicans have spent years blaming Democrats for inflation and promised to quickly bring down grocery prices. Now they have a problem: If they can’t combat inflation immediately, how soon will they face the blame for the price of eggs?
NOTUS spoke to over a dozen Senate Republicans about Trump’s commitment to lowering prices on Day One. They resoundingly rejected the idea that Trump has faltered on one of his campaign promises.
Instead, they argued it wasn’t feasible to begin with.
“It takes time for that to happen,” Sen. Pete Ricketts told NOTUS of the need for Trump to unwind Biden policies the senator blamed for inflation. “The Biden administration has played havoc with our economy and all the rules and regulations they put in place. It will take time to unwind.”
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Democrats have pointed to grocery prices multiple times since Trump took office, saying he promised quick action but has focused on other issues instead.
That narrative clearly irks Republicans.
“You’re asking an unfair question,” Sen. John Kennedy, who sits on the Senate Budget Committee, told NOTUS when asked about a timeline for price changes. “And if you’ve already made up your mind about what kind of article you’re going to write, why are you asking me questions? I made myself very clear. It’s going to be soon.”
Some insisted that Trump didn’t literally mean he’d solve inflation on “Day One” and argued that it’d take months before his economic agenda came to fruition.
“It’s been a week,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin told NOTUS. “Prices don’t just turn down, and it’s interesting that you guys are even asking that. It’s been literally a week.”
Sen. James Lankford also pointed to Trump’s relatively short time in office.
“Just bringing prices down is not one thing. It’s thousands of things to try to be able to deal with different areas,” Lankford said, adding that it was a little too soon to judge how the president will address inflation.
Republicans are not wrong to say price changes take time. Like any major policy change, lowering inflation is a herculean task that can take months, if not years, to achieve. Brian Riedl, an economic policy expert at the Manhattan Institute, put it like this: “Inflation remains stubborn.”
“There is no economic growth lever in the Oval Office or in the Capitol so lawmakers can enact policies that they consider to be pro-growth,” he told NOTUS. “There is never a guarantee that wages, productivity and growth will actually rise because the economy is not that predictable. Even the most sophisticated economic forecasting models have an abysmal track record.”
Still, Trump promised his policies would work quickly. “Prices will come down and come down dramatically and come down fast,” he said in August.
Trump started his backpedal weeks after being elected, minimizing his ability to mitigate prices.
“I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” Trump told Time magazine in late November. “You know, it’s very hard. But I think that they will.”
In the Time interview, the president referenced energy production and a rebuilt supply chain as key components to lowering costs, two areas that Senate Republicans emphasized as well.
“When you lower the cost of gasoline and diesel fuel, the cost of delivering groceries to the grocery stores is reduced, the cost of refrigerating and freezing food in the grocery stores is reduced,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis said. “So I know that’s incremental, but that’s the only way that we can do this, is incrementally.”
The downstream effect of greater energy production, and lower energy costs, is an increase in supply, which several senators said is intrinsic to Trump’s plan to slow inflation. On Inauguration Day, the president signed executive orders declaring a national energy emergency and that would unleash American energy by removing environmental regulations.
“If you increase the supply, that helps bring prices down,” Sen. John Hoeven told NOTUS, adding that Trump’s moves to increase energy production will start having an impact “very soon.” “It’s not like it happens [in] one day.”
The historic inflation experienced as the country recovered from the pandemic in 2022 was partially caused by supply shortages of key consumer products worldwide as people returned to work and demand skyrocketed.
The economy has since bounced back. Underlying metrics depict a robust market that showed resilience and growth during Biden’s final months in office. But on the surface, people still saw high prices that never really fell. Even though inflation eased from the 40-year high experienced in 2022, products remained more expensive than before the pandemic.
Now, Trump faces his own supply crunch as bird flu hits the poultry industry.
Millions of birds have been killed to prevent the spread of disease, raising the average price of eggs to $4.15 per dozen in December, the highest since the inflation crisis in January 2023, when they reached $4.82, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Agriculture Department expects another 20% bump this year.
“That’s what’s driving the prices on this,” Sen. Mike Rounds said, mentioning vaccines as a potential answer, though experts are at odds over whether vaccines are a suitable solution.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt directly blamed the Biden administration for the egg shortage, referring to the bird flu-related cullings as “the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens.”
As for Congress’ role in handling high prices, GOP senators pointed to the reconciliation process. Lawmakers hope to use it to deliver Trump’s major legislative wins through one (or two — no one knows yet) omnibus package, including energy boosts and tax cuts.
Should they succeed, Republicans claim that it would give relief to people feeling a spending crunch. But passing such legislation will take months. The chambers still haven’t agreed on a timeline for the bills, or what will be in them, though Speaker Mike Johnson previously said he’d like the final package on Trump’s desk sometime in April.
While she was on board with reconciliation, Lummis had her own solution.
“Government has to quit printing so dang much money,” Lummis said.
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Tinashe Chingarande and Ben T.N. Mause are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.
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