A federal judge has dismissed the Trump administration's lawsuit seeking to invalidate Michigan's cage-free egg production rules, ruling that the federal government failed to show it was harmed by the state's hen enclosure law. The decision ends, for now, a legal fight that pitted Washington's claims about grocery inflation against Michigan's authority to set its own animal-welfare standards for egg producers.
U.S. District Judge Jane M. Beckering issued the ruling Wednesday, finding that the federal Egg Products Inspection Act does not regulate state legislative authority and that the Department of Justice could not demonstrate direct market injury as a non-producer, according to WATTPoultry. The judge noted the federal government is not itself an egg producer or distributor directly subject to the state's sales restrictions, meaning it lacked standing to challenge the law in the first place, as reported by CBS Detroit.
The lawsuit, filed by the Department of Justice in January, specifically named Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development Director Timothy Boring and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel as co-defendants, according to WZZM 13. Federal officials claimed Michigan's hen enclosure law, which took effect January 1, 2025, imposed unnecessary red tape on large-scale commercial egg producers and contributed to rising egg costs for consumers nationwide, per CBS Detroit's reporting. The federal government sought a declaration that Michigan's law was invalid, arguing the federal Egg Products Inspection Act preempted the state's efforts.
Nessel Calls Suit a Blame-Shifting Attempt
Michigan's attorney general office defended the state in the case, and Nessel said she was pleased the district court dismissed the challenge. She called the lawsuit a thinly veiled attempt to shift blame for higher grocery costs from presidential policies onto state animal-welfare laws, per CBS Detroit. State officials have said Michigan's cage-free egg rules had been in the works for 15 years before taking effect, and pointed out that Ohio also has cage-free egg laws of its own.
Michigan's cage-free policy traces back to Public Act 132 of 2019, which updated the state's 1988 Animal Industry Act after passing a Republican-controlled legislature with broad bipartisan support and being signed into law by then-Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist that November, according to WZZM 13. The law gave egg producers a five-year runway before full enforcement, applying strictly to shell eggs sold for human consumption from commercial farms with 3,000 or more egg-laying hens — a scope that, per the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, explicitly exempts smaller operations, liquid eggs, and cooked egg products.
Producers Sank Hundreds of Millions Into Compliance
Commercial egg producers across Michigan spent hundreds of millions of dollars converting housing facilities into cage-free aviary systems during that five-year transition window, according to Ag Bull Trading, which reported that industry groups intervened directly in the federal lawsuit to protect those investments. Herbruck's Poultry Ranch, Michigan's largest egg producer and the tenth-largest in the nation, produces more than 2.5 billion eggs annually and collaborated with Michigan State University research facilities to transition its infrastructure to cage-free aviaries, per MSUToday. Herbruck's had previously laid off 400 workers in Ionia County amid an avian flu crisis, as Hoodline reported in 2024.
The Michigan case was not an isolated legal maneuver. The Department of Justice, under Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, filed a parallel lawsuit against California in July 2025 using similar arguments, claiming that state's Proposition 12 cage-free mandate unconstitutionally inflated national egg prices, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Michigan is one of 11 states — including California, Massachusetts, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, and Rhode Island — that have enacted cage-free hen housing mandates or bans on caged-egg sales, according to Animal Wellness Action.
Supreme Court Precedent Looms Over the Dispute
Judge Beckering's dismissal rested on standing grounds, leaving the underlying question of whether the federal Egg Products Inspection Act preempts state law formally undecided. But the U.S. Supreme Court's May 2023 ruling in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross established that states retain constitutional authority under the Commerce Clause to enforce in-state animal welfare standards on products sold within their borders, even when those rules affect out-of-state producers, per Justia's case record.
Egg prices did spike dramatically during the period at the center of the federal government's claims. The national average price for a dozen eggs, which had remained well under $3 for years, jumped to $4.80 in January 2023 and hit $6.22 in March 2025, according to CBS Detroit, with U.S. egg prices hitting a record high during 2025. An avian flu outbreak that year killed millions of egg-laying birds, a toll that state officials and poultry producers point to as the true driver of the historic price spikes, rather than cage-free housing requirements.
Separately, the Department of Justice has pursued other avenues in its scrutiny of the egg market. Federal regulators issued civil investigative demands to major producers including Cal-Maine Foods in 2025 and 2026 as part of an antitrust probe into alleged price coordination, according to a Cal-Maine Foods filing. The Department of Justice and more than a dozen states reached a proposed settlement in July with three major egg producers aimed at resolving claims that the companies coordinated efforts to push prices up between June 2022 and March 2025, per CBS Detroit's reporting.
