Egg rationing is here.

With prices rising rapidly and showing no signs of slowing anytime soon, some of the nation’s biggest grocery store chains — including Trader Joe’s, Walmart and Costco — have begun limiting the amount of eggs individual consumers can buy.

This time last year, the average price for a dozen eggs was around $3, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By last month, it had risen to around $5.

And egg prices are expected to climb this year by 20.3 percent, according to the latest outlook from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

Market analysts blame the price hikes on the highly infectious bird flu that has decimated the chicken population and reduced egg supplies during the winter holiday season, when the demand is strong. More than 13 million hens have been lost or slaughtered since December as a result of the bird flu outbreak, according to the Agriculture Department’s latest Egg Markets Overview.

Trader Joe’s is dealing with the shortages by limiting the amount of eggs customers can buy.

“Due to ongoing issues with the supply of eggs, we are currently limiting egg purchases to one dozen per customer, per day, in all Trader Joe’s stores across the country,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “We hope these limits will help to ensure that as many of our customers who need eggs are able to purchase them when they visit Trader Joe’s.”

Walmart is limiting bulk buyers to two 60-count cartons per purchase “to help ensure more customers can have access to eggs,” a spokesperson said.

“Although supply is very tight, we’re working with suppliers to try and help meet customer demand, while striving to keep prices as low as possible.”

There are no restrictions on purchasers of smaller quantities of eggs, the spokesperson said.

At Sam’s Club, purchasers are allowed to buy two cartons of each brand of eggs on the shelves, a spokesperson said.

But at Kroger and Aldi there is a two dozen eggs per trip limit, while Whole Foods and Costco are capping egg purchases at three one-dozen cartons per person in select stores.

Meanwhile, the White House found itself taking flak again from Democrats demanding that President Donald Trump fulfill his campaign promise to immediately start reducing the price of groceries.

“Over the last several weeks, you have done nothing to address these rising costs,” the Congressional Dads Caucus said in a letter Thursday to Trump. “Moreover, your flurry of executive actions has hampered the government’s response to effectively address the underlying causes of this crisis. Eggs are a basic necessity for families in our districts, and the financial burden caused by these surging prices must be resolved.”

In some areas of New York, “the average price of a dozen eggs has reached more than $8 in some stores,” said Tony Hernandez, spokesperson for Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., who leads the group that fired off the letter.

In response to the harsh criticism from congressional Democrats, a White House spokesperson, Anna Kelly, blamed the egg crisis on the ‘Biden Administration’s slow and ineffective response to the bird flu outbreak, which began in 2022.’

“Moms and dads across the country gave President Trump a mandate to take every action to drive down costs, and he is delivering,’ Kelly said in emailed statement.

Trump and Brooke Rollins, who is the president’s pick to head the Agriculture Department, ‘will refocus the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) on its core mission: protecting the health of the United States’ plants, animals, and natural resources,’ Kelly wrote.

In New York City, some bodegas have taken to selling eggs one at a time because their customers can’t afford to shell out $10 or more to buy a dozen eggs, a price that is not unusual in the very expensive city.

“These people don’t have enough money to buy a dozen eggs, so I have to sell them separately,” Fernando Rodriguez, 62, owner of Pamela’s Green Deli in The Bronx, told the New York Post.

Consumers sharply curtailed their spending in January, indicating a potential weakening in economic growth ahead, according to a Commerce Department report Friday.

Retail sales slipped 0.9% for the month from an upwardly revised 0.7% gain in December, even worse than the Dow Jones estimate for a 0.2% decline. The sales totals are adjusted for seasonality but not inflation for a month, in which prices rose 0.5%.

Excluding autos, prices fell 0.4%, also well off the consensus forecast for a 0.3% increase. A “control” measure that strips out several nonessential categories and figures directly into calculations for gross domestic product fell 0.8% after an upwardly revised increase of 0.8%.

With consumer spending making up about two-thirds of all economic activity in the U.S., the sales numbers indicate a potential weakening in growth for the first quarter.

Receipts at sporting goods, music and book stores tumbled 4.6% on the month, while online outlets reported a 1.9% decline and motor vehicles and parts spending dropped 2.8%. Gas stations along with food and drinking establishments both reported 0.9% increases.

Stock market futures held in slightly negative territory following the release, while Treasury yields lost ground. Traders raised bets that the Federal Reserve could cut interest rates again as soon as June.

“The drop was dramatic, but several mitigating factors show there’s no cause for alarm. Some of it can be chalked up to bad weather, and some to auto sales tanking in January after an unusual surge in December due to fat dealer incentives,” said Robert Frick, corporate economist with Navy Federal Credit Union. “Especially considering December was revised up strongly, the rolling average of consumer spending remains solid,” Frick added.

Inflation remains ahead of the Fed’s 2% goal. The consumer price index posted a 0.5% gain in January and showed a 3% annual inflation rate. However, the producer price index, a proxy for wholesale prices, showed some softening in key pipeline inputs.

In other economic news Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that import prices accelerated 0.3% in January, in line with expectations for the largest one-month move since April 2024. On a year-over-year basis, import prices increased 1.9%.

Fuel prices increased 3.2% on the month, also the biggest gain since April 2024. Food, feeds and beverage costs rose 0.2% following a 3% surge in December.

Export prices also increased, rising 1.3%.

When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau made an appearance in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint, the conservative group’s plan was simple: Abolish it entirely.

Now, with a Project 2025 co-author in charge of the bureau, that idea looks like a real possibility.

Over the weekend, Russ Vought, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the powerful Office of Management and Budget, took over as de facto head of the agency and subsequently ordered all nonessential work there to stop. Vought is one of more than 30 co-authors of Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint for the Trump administration’s agenda, though he did not write the section on the CFPB.

“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is arguably the most powerful and unaccountable regulatory agency in existence,” the report states.

Whether the bureau is rendered toothless by its new leadership or abolished by congressional action, its emergence as a target for conservative ire has been years in the making, boosted most recently by technology executives including Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Created by Democrats, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, in the wake of the Great Recession, the CFPB lodged steady but largely unglamorous wins for consumers. 

Yet all the while, it faced a drumbeat of opposition from small-government conservatives and business interests who challenged not only its regulations and enforcement actions, but its very basis for existing. Consumer complaints about corporate misbehavior have by some measures reached all-time highs.       

“This is an agency that has an incredible amount of responsibility for regulating in the financial services sector,” said Julie Margetta Morgan, a former associate director at the bureau who started there in 2022 and resigned right after Trump’s second inauguration. She added, “There are a number of big bank lobbyists who have had it out for the CFPB from Day 1.”

But most recently, some in the tech world — including those who have become particularly influential with the Trump administration — have been its loudest critics.

Musk, who leads the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort, posted “RIP CFPB” on X on Sunday. Andreesen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, said on a podcast last year that the agency had been “terrorizing financial institutions.” Part of his criticism has centered around “debanking,” something that the CFPB itself also tried to stop. (In 2021, the CFPB shuttered a lending startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz.) 

“The CFPB works for regular people that don’t run in Elon’s circle,” said one current CFPB employee, who was granted anonymity out of fear of reprisal. “Elon doesn’t know single mothers whose cars break down and are scammed by predatory car lenders. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be driven into debt by overdraft fees. He doesn’t have a mortgage he is struggling to pay off. So he can’t understand why the CFPB is so important to protect regular folks from being scammed.”

Compared with the vast resources historically commanded by the Justice Department’s antitrust division, not to mention the Federal Trade Commission — the agency traditionally tasked with enforcing consumer regulations — the CFPB’s remit was always relatively limited in scope. Notably, its annual budget has never exceeded $1 billion.  

It is thus perhaps not surprising that it never landed a proverbial knockout blow that would stick in the minds of the American public. Still, it steadily gained a favorable reputation. In 2015, Time magazine devoted a major feature to the bureau under the headline, “The Agency That’s Got Your Back.”   

Margetta Morgan, the former CFPB associate director, said eliminating medical debt from credit reports has been particularly significant.

“When CFPB started digging in on medical debt, it was astounding to see the extent to which consumers had inaccurate medical debt on their credit reports and then were being hounded by debt collectors over them,” she said. “I think the medical debt rulemaking was huge, and we saw that when we spoke to individual consumers.”

Yet as early as 2017, conservatives were charting a path to end the agency altogether. An article that year published by the Heritage Foundation — the group whose Project 2025 now appears, despite some Trump assurances to the contrary, to be driving much of his second administration’s rollout — laid out the case against the CFPB’s very existence.

“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is arguably the most powerful and unaccountable regulatory agency in existence,” the article’s authors wrote, arguing that its rulemaking ultimately restricted Americans’ access to credit while “eroding their financial independence” and posing concerns about due process and separation of powers. 

Instead, they said, consumers would enjoy the same protections if the agency’s powers were swept back into the Federal Trade Commission and if existing state and local laws were enforced, they said.   

One of the authors, Norbert Michel, today a vice president at the pro-free-market Cato Institute, told NBC News that assuming that malfeasance is taking place — something he said there is often disagreement about — enforcement powers already exist at multiple government agencies, not to mention at the state level, to address it.

“In one sense, you’ve given a new federal agency extreme discretionary power — and in other sense, done nothing new,” Michel said. “So somewhere in there you have an increase in government authority that’s not necessary.”

Still, the agency persisted and became particularly active under Rohit Chopra, a Biden appointee, who helped bring actions against many major lenders, as well as financial technology firms and loan servicing groups. 

Chopra’s largest action came against Wells Fargo, which paid a $1.7 billion penalty over accusations it improperly repossessed cars and froze customers’ accounts. Chopra also engineered a settlement with Navient, formerly among the nation’s largest student-loan servicers, over allegedly abusive practices.    

Yet it was the agency’s recent work around so-called financial technology enterprises that may have created the conditions for its demise. In 2023, it sought to subject large fintech players like PayPal and Venmo to the same supervisory examination process as banks.

Since that time, Musk has made clear he hopes to turn X into a payments platform. X recently announced a deal with Visa to begin processing payments. 

“You have Silicon Valley VCs not wanting any oversight of their businesses, many of which are premised on the idea that [financial technology] somehow is new and different and thus not subject to traditional consumer protections,” said another current CFPB employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Last year, the Supreme Court heard the first challenge to the CFPB’s very existence — and decided in its favor, with Justice Clarence Thomas, viewed as among the court’s most conservative members, writing for the 7-2 majority that Congress had been clear in setting up its funding mechanism as a body of the Federal Reserve. 

That did not stop the chorus of voices calling for the agency to be reined in. Notably, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 referred to the CFPB as little more than “a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits politically aligned with those who spearheaded its creation.”

“The CFPB is a highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency,” Robert Bowes, an official in Trump’s first administration, wrote. “It is unconstitutional. Congress should abolish the CFPB.” Consumer protection functions, he said, should be returned to banking regulators and the Federal Trade Commission.

For consumer advocates, such an outcome would be cataclysmic for everyday Americans.  

“The CFPB protects real people from financial companies ripping them off,” said Erin Witte, director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit group. “If your car has been illegally repossessed by a bank, or if you’ve been the victim of a predatory student loan servicer, or ever had to pay junk fees, the CFPB steps up to make sure a company can’t rip you off.”

Its potential elimination, Witte said, will have “disastrous consequences” and should be “infuriating” to almost everyone.