2025-07-31
Fireflies light up summer skies. But the glowing bugs are still on the decline
About six months into the second term of President Donald Trump, Republicans and Democrats are making conflicting and often misleading assessments of the Trump administration’s impact on inflation and prices. Both sides cherry-pick examples of consumer products to support their claims, while sometimes wrongly taking credit for lower prices or falsely casting blame for rising costs.Experts say the reasons for the rise or fall of prices usually involve a number of factors beyond the policies implemented in the first six months of the current administration, and predictions of success or failure of those policies, including tariffs, are still to be determined.“The economy is roaring, business confidence is soaring, incomes are up, prices are down and inflation is dead, it’s dead,” Trump proclaimed at the White House Faith Office luncheon on July 14.At a news briefing the same day, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries offered a different portrait of the American economy. “Costs aren’t going down in the United States of America, costs are going up,” he said. “America is too expensive. And things aren’t getting better under Donald Trump and House Republican rule, they’re getting worse.”Inflation, a major theme of the 2024 election, had increased substantially during the first half of President Joe Biden’s term, due largely to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. For the 12-month period ending in June 2022, the Consumer Price Index increased 9.1% – “the largest 12-month change since the period ending November 1981,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics said. The annual CPI moderated to below 3% for the six months before Trump returned to the White House, as we’ve written. It was 3% for the 12 months ending in January.Contrary to Trump’s claim, not all prices are “down” and inflation isn’t “dead.” Based on the CPI, the inflation rate was 2.7% for the 12 months ending in June, and was up 0.8% from January to June. Core inflation, which doesn’t include the categories of food and energy, rose 2.9% from June 2024. In January, annual core inflation was 3.3%.Not all costs are “going up,” either, as Jeffries suggested.We reached out to the White House for information to support Trump’s statements, but we did not receive a response. We also asked Jeffries’ office for support for his statements, and his office said it would “let the Leader’s comments on the record speak for themselves.” Jeffries’ office also noted the rise in the CPI in June and increases in prices for groceries, beef and other specific items.In this story we’ll examine recent changes in the prices of some of the products Republican and Democratic leaders cite as bellwethers of the economic climate.GroceriesAt a campaign event on Aug. 15, 2024, at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump spotlighted the high cost of food under the Biden administration. Surrounded by staged displays of groceries, Trump said, “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down.”Then, in an interview in the Dec. 30 issue of Time magazine, Trump backpedaled on his pledge regarding grocery prices. “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” he said. “You know, it’s very hard.”Yet, during a White House lunch with the presidents of West African nations on July 9, Trump responded to a reporter’s question about the impact of his economic policies, saying, “I brought down the cost of groceries. I brought down the cost of energy, tremendously energy, tremendously groceries.”Also on July 9, in an interview on MSNBC, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin said Trump “ran on lowering costs for people. That was the issue last year. And now every action he’s taking appears to be raising costs for families, whether that’s food at the grocery store.” Baldwin added later, “we need to make sure that ... the public is crystal clear about why their grocery bill isn’t going down, but is in fact going up.”The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI for “food-at-home” — products bought at a grocery store or supermarket — increased from January to June by 0.6%, and was up 2.4% from June 2024. The USDA’s Economic Research Service in July estimated that for 2025, “Food-at-home prices are predicted to increase 2.2 percent,” the midpoint of an estimated range of 1.1% to 3.4%.“Grocery prices have been accelerating,” Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the nonpartisan Budget Lab at Yale University, told us via email. “Grocery prices overall are literally up over the last five months.”“On the other hand, a little bit of grocery inflation is typical, and it’s not clear that the president has much to do with recent grocery price dynamics,” Tedeschi said, noting the impact of climate and disease on the prices of beef and eggs in recent years.“On the third hand, while presidents have very few levers to actually affect prices, one they do have is tariffs, and tariffs have gone up considerably this year, from a 2.4% average effective tariff rate in January,” Tedeschi said, to an average effective tariff rate of 20.6% as of July 14, according to the Budget Lab. Due to Trump’s tariffs, “Over the next year or two, we think food prices will rise 3.7% more than otherwise, and stay 3.2% higher over the longer-run (5-10 years),” he said.EggsAt the summit with West African leaders on July 9, Trump said his administration had brought down the price of eggs since January. “If you remember my first week in office, the press was screaming at me about the cost of eggs. They were four times higher than they were just a short time ago. That was caused by Biden and stupid policies, and we got that down. And by Easter, it was normalized and now it’s actually even at a lower price,” the president said.The nationwide average price for a dozen grade A white eggs paid by consumers declined from $4.95 in January to $3.78 in June, a 23.8% decrease, according to the most recent data available from BLS. Still, the price of eggs was 39% higher than the same time a year ago.While Trump blamed Biden’s policies for soaring egg prices in 2024 and early 2025, many economists said the primary cause has been the highly pathogenic avian influenza that has been spreading in the U.S. among poultry, cows and wild animals since 2022, as we’ve written. The bird flu outbreak caused an egg shortage, as tens of millions of hens have been killed to prevent further spread of the virus.Trump has credited a strategy led by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins — including increased biosecurity assessments of flocks, financial relief for farmers and the import of eggs from other countries to reduce shortages — for the lower egg prices since January.But Jeremy Horpedahl, an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas, told us in an email, “Most of the decline in egg prices this year was due to bird flu season ending, which typically happens when wild birds are migrating. Wholesale egg prices started falling right at the beginning of March 2025, which is before most of the new policies of the Trump administration went into place. So I would say the policies haven’t had much effect yet on prices.”“Prices could rise again in the fall if there are more bird flu outbreaks,” said Horpedahl, who is the director of the Arkansas Center for Research in Economics. “Some of Trump’s policies, such as increased biosecurity, could mitigate bird flu spread in the future, but that is something we’ll have to wait and see whether the policies benefit egg prices.”news2 hours agoTrump says he asked 17 drugmakers to take steps to cut U.S. prices within 60 daysTrump administrationJul 29How will Trump's E.U. tariffs affect drug prices?BeefThe price of another American staple, ground beef, hit a record high $6.10 per pound in June, an 11.1% increase since January, according to BLS data.That economic news prompted Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire to lay the blame on Trump. “The president has imposed a national sales tax through these reckless tariffs, driving up the cost of food, housing and other goods and services,” she said at a media luncheon on July 15. “And families know this firsthand. Beef and ice cream prices today hit new record high prices, with ground beef prices reaching an average of more than $6.00 per pound for the first time ever.”But like the increase in egg prices, factors that have led to the rise in beef prices began years ago.Drought conditions in the Plains and Upper Midwest over the past few years “really placed a lot of stress on our farmers and their pastures that they rely on to help feed cattle,” Bernt Nelson, an agricultural economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, told NBC News. “When this happened, they placed high numbers of females on feed for market rather than holding them back to replace the herd. And so that led us to this slow but steady contraction in the cattle herd.” The inventory of the beef herd in 2024 was the smallest since 1951, Nelson wrote in a 2024 Farm Bureau report, and the number dropped another 1% by the start of 2025, the USDA reported.Restrictions on the import of cattle from Central and South America to replace supply in the U.S. have also affected the price of beef. A case of New World screwworm, a parasite that kills host animals, found in Mexico in July led the USDA to suspend imports of live cattle from Mexico into the U.S.Experts are also concerned about Trump’s threatened 50% tariff on some imports from Brazil, now set to go into effect on Aug. 6. Trump’s executive order on the tariffs objects to the prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally, on charges of an attempted coup.“The 50% tariffs on Brazil will effectively shut out Brazil beef from the USA, just at a time when we are critically short of beef and prices are already at record high levels,” Bob Chudy, a consultant for U.S. beef importers, told us.“Imported beef comprises about 20% of USA beef supply and Brazil is 30% of the imported beef coming to the USA. That number has exploded in recent years, filling the gap in the USA domestic supply,” Chudy also told us via email. “Since the 50% announcement all exports to the USA from Brazil have come to a complete halt. Even meat that was already put in containers, destined for the USA market has been held in Brazil in the hope that Trump backs down like he so often has,” he said.GasolineThe average retail price of gasoline has stayed largely the same since Trump took office, though the cost now is relatively low for summer pricing. The national average was $3.11 per gallon for regular gas the week ending Jan. 20, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which calculates the cost of all grades of gasoline across the country. It was $3.12 for the week ending July 28, a small increase of less than 0.5%. However, gas is typically more expensive in the summer because the formula used in warm weather is more expensive and demand is higher. In July 2024, for instance, the average price was $3.48 per gallon.Overall, the price of gasoline is expected to continue its downward trend, analysts predicted at the beginning of the year.Prices reached a peak in 2022, due primarily to a drop-off in global supply following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — which prompted sanctions against one of the world’s three biggest oil producers — and a resurgence in demand as the world came out of the COVID-19 pandemic.But Trump has been claiming credit for the current prices, which are in their third year of a general decline, and making false claims about the price at the pump.At the start of the summer, during a July 3 rally in Des Moines, Iowa, the president said that “we’ve already cured inflation. Your gas prices are way down.”Later in the month, at a July 14 luncheon, the president exaggerated the price of gasoline, saying, “Gas prices have reached the lowest level in five decades. ... I got to make sure that people can afford to produce the gas, but the gas has gone to the lowest level in decades and you’re seeing $1.99, $1.98. And I saw $1.95 at certain states.”There’s no support for either of these claims.“First of all, this is not the lowest in decades,” Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told us in a phone interview.As we said, the current average of $3.12 per gallon is low for the summer, but gas was a close $3.14 in the last week of July in 2021, during Biden’s presidency, before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. And as we said, it is 1 cent per gallon higher than the day Trump took office.The EIA numbers are national averages, but even in states where gas is cheaper, De Haan said, there’s “no way” it’s below $2, as Trump claimed. We wrote about a similar claim from the president in April and the same thing holds — none of the state averages reported by AAA have been below $2 per gallon. The lowest state price as of July 29 was an average $2.70 in Mississippi.As for who gets the credit — or the blame — for gas prices, it’s not the president, De Haan said.The largest factor in determining the price of gas at the pump is the cost of crude oil, which has gone down since January and is affected by markets around the world.“It’s a balance of the global economy, not just the U.S. economy, that dictates oil and gas prices,” De Haan said.EnergyTrump made a campaign promise to “cut energy and electricity prices in half” in his first year, but so far, those prices have largely continued to follow their already existing trends.The CPI for energy overall is down 1.6% between January and June, but household energy rose 5.5%, according to BLS data.The president has recently, however, claimed to have lowered energy prices. During a diplomatic lunch on July 9, Trump said, “I brought down the cost of energy, tremendously energy.”It’s unclear what measure Trump is referring to, and, as we said, the White House didn’t respond to our questions about his statements on prices. Some Democrats have criticized the president’s policies and made the opposite claim. House Minority Leader Jeffries, for example, has speculated that the recently passed Republican tax and spending bill will cause utility costs to increase and said on July 14, “Costs aren’t going down.”We don’t know what will happen in the future, but we do know that the overall cost of services used for heating, cooling, lighting, cooking, and running appliances and household equipment have increased so far in Trump’s second term. Those are the measures included in the BLS index tracking household energy prices.Electric power — which is generated by a variety of sources — accounts for the largest share of energy consumption in the U.S., according to a 2024 report from the Energy Information Administration. The average price of electricity — which Trump has singled out as a priority — has risen about 6% between January and June and is projected to continue increasing faster than the rate of inflation through 2026, according to the EIA.Data from the BLS show a 12.2% increase in the average price per kilowatt hour in 2022 and a relatively steady increase since.“Overall, U.S. energy prices rapidly increased from 2020 to 2022 as economic activity recovered after the worst of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine interrupted energy supply chains. Since 2022, nominal prices for many fuels have declined, particularly for those such as gasoline and heating oil that are tied more closely to crude oil prices, which are affected by international markets,” the EIA wrote in an analysis of energy prices published on May 14. “Electricity prices, though, have continued a steady increase.”Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.
