WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of House members introduced the Lower Egg Prices Act on March 19.

The bill from Rep. Josh Riley (D-NY), Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD), Rep. Pat Harrigan (R-NC), and Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-MI) would permit hundreds of millions of eggs to be sold that have previously been discarded.

Federal regulations currently require farmers to refrigerate eggs 36 hours after they are laid. However, the rule does not distinguish between table eggs that need refrigeration and breaker eggs used in various processed grocery products.

The legislation is similar to the request the National Chicken Council (NCC) made last month to the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to reverse or change a regulation that forces broiler eggs to be discarded.

The NCC previously stated that 400 million eggs per year would be made available if the FDA makes the change.

“I want to thank Rep. Riley for his leadership on this important issue, and thank Reps. Johnson, Harrigan and McDonald Rivet for lending their support to this commonsense effort,” said Harrison Kircher, president of the (NCC). “With Easter right around the corner, coupled with ongoing high egg prices, we should be doing everything we can to help the egg supply, and this is low-hanging fruit.”

Along with the proposed bill, more than a dozen members of the House of Representatives wrote a letter to Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Sara Brenner urging the agency to grant NCC’s petition.

“The rule requires the broiler industry to discard eggs that don’t meet certain refrigeration requirements,” the letter says. “Those requirements make sense for table eggs, which are raw products, but the rule makes no sense for broiler eggs, which are pasteurized. The FDA and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said as much in a 2020 joint risk assessment, which concluded that broiler eggs present an extremely low public risk due to the ‘extremely high pasteurization efficiency’ of the egg-breaking pasteurization process.”