President Donald Trump’s second term has been very good to large meat companies, which raise and slaughter some 10 billion animals each year. But his administration just gave the industry perhaps its biggest gift yet — in the form of a lawsuit against California.

The lawsuit, filed on July 9 by the Department of Justice, seeks to dismantle part of California’s Proposition 12, the nation’s strongest law for farmed animals, which requires that pork, veal, and eggs sold in California come from animals who were raised with minimum space requirements — essentially cage-free conditions.

Passed by ballot measure in 2018, Proposition 12 doesn’t quite guarantee humane conditions for farmed animals, but it does at least ban some of the worst factory farming practices: confining egg-laying hens in tiny cages and female breeding pigs in “gestation crates,” cages so small that they prevent the pregnant pigs from turning around for virtually their entire lives.

The Trump administration’s lawsuit would nullify the part of the law that covers eggs, which it partially blames for high egg prices not just in California, but across the whole country.

The lawsuit, however, is confusing two entirely separate issues. Cage-free eggs do cost more than eggs produced with cages, though not by much — just a few pennies per egg. Agriculture economists overwhelmingly agree that US egg prices have skyrocketed nationwide over the last few years not because of cage-free egg laws, but because of the bird flu, which has led to the brutal culling of more than 100 million egg-laying hens since 2022. That has caused acute egg shortages and price spikes — especially in fall and winter months when bird flu hits the hardest.

“What you saw was this huge amount of birds out of the system, and then we just have a shortage of eggs,” said Jada Thompson, an associate professor of agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas. She estimates that 90 percent of the rise in national egg prices can be attributed to bird flu.

So ending cage-free laws won’t do much to bring down egg prices, nor do egg producers want to dismantle those laws, because they’ve already invested billions of dollars to convert their barns to cage-free.

Then what, exactly, is the point of the lawsuit? The Justice Department didn’t respond to an interview request for this story. But a number of factors suggest it’s likely a smokescreen for other political goals.

The Trump administration and Republicans like to beat up on California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who many speculate has presidential ambitions of his own. The administration is also........

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