In August 2024, then-candidate former President Donald Trump delivered a press conference surrounded by packaged foods, meats, produce, condiments, milk and eggs.
“When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One,” he said at the time.
It was a pledge he repeated on the campaign trail, often followed by the phrase, “drill, baby, drill.” And to many voters, inflation was a justifiable target: Years of sharply rising prices had taken a toll on their hard-earned pay and their livelihoods.
But Day One has turned into Day Seven, and those eggs are getting even more expensive.
Despite a flurry of executive actions, Trump’s price-related promises have gone unfulfilled, Democratic lawmakers wrote in a letter addressed to the president.
“You have instead focused on mass deportations and pardoning January 6 attackers, including those who assaulted Capitol police officers,” according to the letter signed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and 20 congressional Democrats. “Your sole action on costs was an executive order that contained only the barest mention of food prices, and not a single specific policy to reduce them.”
In fact, the lawmakers added, Trump appears to be “backtracking” on those promises, conceding in recent weeks that it’s “hard to bring things down.”
On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance made a similar comment to CBS’s Margaret Brennan when asked about grocery prices.
“Prices are going to come down, but it’s going to take a little bit of time,” he said, adding that the way to lower prices is “to encourage more capital investment into our country.”
Trump’s frequent price-dropping pledges have long been countered by economists who have noted that broad-based price declines not only would be outright dangerous for an economy by creating a deflationary “doom loop,” but, also, that they’d be improbable to achieve.
“No president is able to lower prices in a week, and some of the promises that were made about how quickly prices were going to come down were probably never achievable,” said Tyler Schipper, economist and associate professor at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minnesota. “Some of the most stark things that people are still seeing at the grocery store are almost entirely due to price dynamics that were in place before.”
Egg prices, for example, have been driven higher as a result of a deadly bird flu that has constricted supply; meat prices have been on the rise because of ongoing drought; coffee prices are expected to jump because of severe weather in South America; and housing costs will continue to rise because of a long-running shortage of inventory.
Trump has argued that he can help bring down food prices by drilling for more oil domestically; however, the US already is producing more oil than any country in history.
“The incentives [to drill more] aren’t great for oil companies,” Schipper said. “They certainly want the rights to drill; but given the price of oil right now, there’s not a lot of incentive for them to open up a bunch more oil capacity and push prices down further.”
Plus, Schipper noted, it takes time to increase production.
While more oil might not be as immediate a solution as the president may hope, Schipper said there may be potential in reducing housing regulations.
However, that takes time, too, he said.
“There are lags between changing the policy and then developers seeing changes in policy and then gaming out how much that saves them, then actually building the apartments, and people moving into them,” Schipper said. “But a lot of that regulation is not at the federal level. A lot of that regulation is at the city and state level.”
While slowing down inflation takes time (just ask the Federal Reserve), the Democratic lawmakers did offer potential solutions as well as an olive branch.
“If you are indeed committed to lowering food prices, we stand ready to work with you,” according to the letter. “Last year, we put forward several recommendations for executive action to lower food prices by encouraging competition and fighting price-gouging at each level of the food supply chain.”
Inflation has slowed significantly since peaking in June 2022; however, it still hovers above the Fed’s target rate of 2%.
US central bankers meet this week and are expected to hold rates steady, economists say, noting both inflation’s stubborn retreat trajectory as well as uncertainty around Trump’s tariff and immigration policies that could ultimately raise prices.
“Tariffs have the effect, especially for goods that are more concentrated in individual countries, to raise prices,” Schipper said, noting Trump’s floated 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. “Particularly with Mexico, we import about 60% of fresh fruit and 40% of fresh vegetables. It’s one of those things where the argument for preserving American jobs is just weaker in some of those categories; because in winter in the United States, we don’t have the ability to grow some of those fruits and vegetables.”
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