With Grocery Prices Still Skyrocketing And Trump Mocking Affordability As A “Hoax,” Leader Schumer Unveils Landmark Legislation To Break Up The Meatpacking Monopoly And Drive[...]

Washington, D.C. - Today, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats introduced the Family Grocery and Farmer Relief Act, legislation which would break up dominant meatpackers, rein in foreign controlled corporate giants, and use federal tools to stop unfair pricing that drives up grocery bills for American families and hurts workers, farmers, and ranchers.

As President Trump mocks affordability as a 'hoax,' Senate Democrats have launched a year-long initiative to tackle the high cost of living, focusing on the issues that matter to American families. Today, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) led Senate Democrats in introducing the Family Grocery and Farmer Relief Act, a competition driven, pro-farmer, pro-rancher, pro-worker, pro-consumer, cost of living bill that breaks up dominant meatpackers, reins in foreign controlled corporate giants, and uses all available tools to stop unfair pricing that drives up grocery bills for American families. It is designed to turn big structural reforms into concrete benefits: more competition and greater fairness for farmers and ranchers, more resilient supply chains, and lower prices and better choices at the meat counter.

This landmark legislation builds on a roundtable that Leader Schumer and Senate Democrats held last week that highlighted President Trump's broken promises to bring down the cost of everyday items, including grocery prices, and focused on solutions that would actually help American families.

"As Trump tries to distract the American people with endless conflict and military adventurism, Senate Democrats are laser-focused on lowering the skyrocketing cost of living," said Leader Schumer. "The pernicious stranglehold of the meatpacking monopoly has weakened our supply chains and price gouged consumers at the grocery store. This not the "Golden Age" Donald Trump promised. But it's what this administration does best - cater to special interests and corporations at the expense of middle-class families. That's why Democrats are going to do what Donald Trump refuses to do: put the affordability crisis front and center, every day, all year long."

This legislation is co-sponsored by Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ), Peter Welch (D-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ed Markey (D-MA), Andy Kim (D-NJ), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

The Family Grocery and Farmer Relief Act:

• Makes it unlawful for a major meatpacking conglomerate to control more than one major type of meat, forcing the biggest players to choose a line of business;
• Imposes hard caps on the concentration of beef markets at both the regional and national levels;
• • If these thresholds are exceeded, the FTC must order targeted divestitures-selling off plants, facilities, or business units, or spinning off new independent firms-until markets are competitive again
• Directs the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to design and enforce divestiture plans, so the law delivers real structural change, not just fines that companies treat as a cost of doing business, while maintaining or improving employment, honoring collective bargaining agreements, and promoting safer and more stable workplaces for workers across the supply chain.
• Prohibits foreign leverage over the domestic meat market, empowering FTC to protect competition and national security;
• Links the bill's structural reforms to kitchen-table prices by focusing on unfair and unjustly discriminatory pricing practices in retail and wholesale meat markets that hit independent and neighborhood grocers hardest;
• Authorizes the Small Business Administration (SBA) to provide financial assistance, loan guarantees, technical assistance, and other support to farmers' cooperatives and small business concerns that seek to acquire, operate, or expand meatpacking plants or facilities divested under the Act;
• Makes failure to divest enforceable under the FTC act, backed by significant civil penalties.

The text of the legislation can be seen here. A breakdown of each section of the legislation can be seen here.

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Today, Leader Schumer joined a coalition of farmers, former antitrust enforcers, and advocates ready to end abusive "Big Ag" practices, curb the influence of foreign meat producers, and lower costs for the American people. At the event, Leader Schumer announced the introduction of this legislation. Below is a transcript of Leader Schumer's remarks:

On Tuesday night, Americans once again stormed to the polls in another high-turnout election. The message from the public was unmistakable. People are fed up, fed up with the direction of this country, fed up with the chaos, but most of all they are fed up with the sky-high costs that have plagued Americans for far too long.

While Donald Trump brags about which tariffs he'll slap on countries today, tomorrow, or next week, while he threatens to send our troops to Iran, people across America are scratching their heads and wondering who's looking out for us. Chaos dominates our cable news headlines, but anxiety and worry dominate our kitchen tables. Families agonize amongst themselves about which bills they can pay this month.

And today, things have gotten so bad that a trip to the grocery store can bring worry and strife to a whole lot of families. Donald Trump claimed at the State of the Union that grocery prices have come down. That's a lie, plain and simple, but a very good lie.

In the last year alone, the price of beef, as Nidhi [Hegde] mentions, is up 16 percent to over $6 a pound. Orange juice is up 30 percent. Lettuce is up 7.3 percent. Rice is up 5 percent. And something as commonplace as coffee is up 33 percent.

Friends, this is not sustainable. If you can't afford to pay for food, then there's no way you'll be able to keep up with rent or energy bills or daycare. You're trapped. That's how Americans feel. Trapped. And they're trapped because Donald Trump promised to bring food costs down. And instead, they've gone up. And instead of taking people's worries seriously, Donald Trump and his administration are in a bubble. His Secretary of Agriculture says people should just spend less on groceries. Isn't it amazing what she said? It can cost around $3 a meal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other thing. Amazing. She's not serious. They're not serious.

Well, Senate Democrats have a message for the country. We hear you. We hear you. Every day, every month, every week, Democrats will put costs front and center in our agenda. And that's what we've been doing.

We will do what Donald Trump refuses. Present a real, comprehensive plan for how a Democratic majority will lower the cost of living for the American people. We'll go issue by issue, spending weeks at a time, deliberately, in depth, rolling out a battle plan for each front on the war of high costs.

Two months ago, we released our plan to tackle the housing crisis. Soon, we will turn to energy costs, childcare, and health care. And today, we're here to talk about how we'll lower food costs for families.

Of course, there are many reasons why food costs have risen. There's Trump's tariffs. There's the disruption in our supply chains. There's the acceleration of climate change, which Trump and Republicans have made worse by eliminating clean energy investments. At fault also is illness in our livestock. But there's also a deeper, more structural problem at play.

Today, a handful of powerful corporations have turned food and farming into a rigged game.

Forty years ago, four top meat packers controlled no more than 36% of the beef market. Today, the big four control not only 85% of the beef market, but 67% of the pork market and 60% of the poultry market. One mega-conglomerate can now dominate beef, pork, and chicken all at once.

And it's not just meat. Four firms control more than half of all flour milling in America. Two companies control half the carrot supply. And it's not just food. It's the inputs that our farmers need to produce the food.

A generation ago, dozens of firms competed to sell fertilizer. Today, just three companies dominate the market. When so much market power is concentrated within so few corporations, Americans at the grocery store see prices go up. And while farmers across the country see their profits go down, corporate players have a free reign to rig the system.

Last year, JBS, one of the biggest meat processing companies on earth, was forced to pay $84 million in fines for inflating meat prices while conspiring to limit supply. Last year, Tyson Foods and Cargill agreed to pay $88 million to settle price-fixing lawsuits. It's good that these schemes were caught, but this won't stop on its own. We know that.

So as long as these companies hold monopolistic power, these price-gouging schemes will happen again and again.

A month ago, Tyson Foods announced they're going to shut down one of the major meat processing plants in Nebraska. This one plant accounts for 5% of all of America's meat processing capacity. Shutting it down means fewer choices for cattle ranchers. It means ranchers make less from their livestock. It means the loss of thousands of jobs and the devastation of a rural town, a story we hear far too often across rural America. And it means higher price at the grocery store, as this shutdown creates more bottlenecks in our supply chains.

And do our farmers and ranchers see any of the profits when the prices go up? Of course they don't. Of course they don't.

When bacon is sold for $6.99 at the supermarket, just $1.07 goes back to the farmer. For every dollar of beef sold in the supermarket, only $0.30 makes it to the cattle rancher. The CEO of Tysons, meanwhile, got a 51% pay bump in 2024, earning a cushy $34 million.

That's why farmers come to Congress year after year asking for help. This is why over the last four decades, half a million farms have been wiped off the map.

And now to be very clear, this is a problem that both parties have ignored. Markets have been consolidating since the 1980s. Democrats should not shy away from the truth, but make no mistake, under Donald Trump the cost of groceries, the ability of people to pay for them, has gone from bad to worse.

Donald Trump and Republicans cut hundreds of billions from SNAP benefits, making it harder for millions to put food on the table. The administration turned a blind eye to corporate corruption. They've stalled high-profile investigations. Under Andrew Ferguson, the FTC has gone from standing up to monopolies to rubber-stamping mergers.

And then, of course, we have Trump's tariffs. They've been a disaster for food costs. Coffee is more expensive. Seafood is more expensive. Spices and seasonings are more expensive. Even chocolate and candy are more expensive.

And nobody has suffered more than our farmers. Tariffs on tractors went from 0% to 16%. Tariffs on fertilizers went from 0% to 10%. Tariffs on pesticides went from 6% to a crushing 24%. These tariffs eat away at farmers' dwindling bottom lines. And the weaker they become, the less able they will be able to afford their inputs and the more susceptible they are to being bought out by the big shots, by the big players, and thus more consolidation will happen in the market with all its bad effects.

The American people have had enough. Our farmers want relief from monopoly power. Our families want relief at the grocery store.

So today, as part of Democrats' lower-cost agenda, I'm proud to introduce with my colleagues the Family Grocery and Farmer Relief Act, a pro-consumer, pro-competition, pro-worker, and pro-farmer bill.

We now have 12 Senate Democrats on this bill and counting. I think I'll name them. Aside from Peter Welch, who's here, we have Senator Booker, a member on Agriculture, Senator Warren, our Ranking Member on Banking, Senator Sanders, Senator Gallego, Senator Merkley, Senator Schatz, Senator Durbin, who's Ranking Member on Judiciary, Senator Markey, Senator Kim, and Senator Merkley.

I want to thank them. Our bill rests on a simple idea. To lower costs, we need more competition. And to create more competition, we have to break the stranglehold of these monopolistic corporations.

Our bill will do this by first breaking up dominant meatpackers by forcing the biggest players to choose a line of business instead of sprawling empires across beef, pork, and poultry. Second, breaking up the monopolistic beef marketplace. Third, taking on foreign-controlled conglomerates that squeeze American producers and distort U.S. markets. Fourth, using the full power of government to investigate, expose, and act against grocery price gouging. And finally, making divestitures pro-farmer and pro-worker, empowering rural communities.

It's not right for a single company to have the power to dominate beef, pork, chicken all at once. So we will empower the FTC to break them up. We will empower the FTC to similarly look at the beef industry, which is especially concentrated. And we will empower the FTC to push these large corporations to divest as needed.

As we do these things, our bill puts small and medium-sized ranchers first. We will prioritize small and mid-sized producers, including farmer co-ops, including independent processors, including worker-owned and community-based plants that will support jobs in rural communities.

And we can certainly do it again. This is, in a certain sense, history repeating itself, at least we hope. Over 120 years-up until ago, 120 years ago-Upton Sinclair famously published a novel we all know, The Jungle. We know the story.

It instantly reached fame for its depiction of unsafe working conditions in the meatpacking industry. But less remembered was Sinclair's focus on the massive consolidation of that industry, where just like today, a few powerful firms dominated pricing and supply.

Sinclair's book opened up America's eyes to the awful power of monopoly and the suffering it caused to workers. It outraged the public and helped motivate Congress to create the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, in 1914. And as fate would have it, their first major investigation was into meatpacking. That was their first one, in which they found that five companies alone-these are their words back in 1914-five companies alone, "attained such a dominant position that they control at will the market in which they buy their supplies, the market in which they sell their products and hold the fortunes of their competitors in their hands."

And a few years later, Congress responded to these findings by passing the Packers and Stockyards Act, which curbed the power of the meatpacking giant and gave the federal government the tools to restore competition and protect producers.

120 years after Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, the American food industry faces the same kind of Goliaths that back then controlled our food supply and raised our prices.

It is time for Congress to do what progressive areas of the era's past did so well, take action to break the monopoly powers, bring the cost down through true competition. My bill will do exactly that. It's part of our Democratic agenda. We get the majority and we're going to get this done.

At the end of the day, this is what it's all about, making groceries more affordable, making farmers more profitable, and putting the needs of working middle class people ahead of the interests of powerful corporations.

So, I thank you to my colleagues who have joined me in this quest, in this effort, in this all, it's a crusade. I'm excited to lower costs here and across the board. I'm excited to get to work with everybody on this bill, some of the advocates here we've worked with, and we have a lot of work in front of us as we continue to roll out the Democrats' year-long lower cost agenda. Let's roll up our sleeves. Let's get to work.

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