The Lever - 🥚 What’s in your omelet?

🎧 On Lever Time Premium: Are we in a constitutional crisis? We ask Watergate whistleblower John Dean in a special premium episode of Lever Time, just for paying subscribers. 

⬇️ Spend four minutes reading this 870-word newsletter to learn about:

• Trump flipping the script on the populist agenda that Dems bailed on.
• The mega-monopolies behind the egg crisis. 
• How Americans really feel about Elon Musk’s DOGE.
• Kamala Harris' second act.
• The statement that has military contractors shaking in their boots.

🏥 I do not think this means what you think it means. Last month, President Donald Trump pledged to “love and cherish” Medicaid, the public health insurance program for 79 million low-income and disabled Americans. But yesterday, he endorsed the House Republican budget proposal that sets the stage for massive cuts. Democrats as well as MAGA acolytes like Steve Bannon and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) are sounding the alarm about the proposal. 

🤔 Trump regulators embrace what Kamala Harris stayed silent on. The new Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission yesterday affirmed that the agency would preserve the tougher merger guidelines put in place by Biden-era antitrust enforcers Jonathan Kanter and Lina Khan (who was boosted by Vice President JD Vance but removed by Trump). While some remain concerned that Ferguson will limit his predecessors’ tough antitrust posture, yesterday’s move follows Trump’s FTC suing to block a Hewlett-Packard merger. 

• Economist Hal Singer spotlighted the changing politics of antitrust, noting that “Kamala Harris couldn’t bring herself to endorse Lina Khan as FTC chair, but Trump’s FTC chair has effectively endorsed Khan’s merger guidelines.” He was referencing Harris declining to endorse Khan’s antitrust agenda while courting donors facing FTC scrutiny and calling for Khan’s firing.

📽️ Democrats forge their Trump-Loss-To-Hollywood Pipeline. Fresh off spending $1.5 billion to lose to Trump, Harris has signed with Hollywood talent agency CAA. She’s following the well-trodden path of Joe Biden, whose belated departure from the race helped Trump win, and the same move by Barack Obama, whose banker-friendly policies helped create backlash conditions for Trump’s rise. But she’s a step behind Hillary Rodham Clinton, who followed her Trump loss by creating her own Hollywood production company.

📉 DOGE is already less popular than the agencies it’s waging war on. The Department of Government Efficiency’s net favorability rating is just 4 percent, according to a new bipartisan poll — making DOGE decidedly less popular than many of the very agencies Musk is trying to dismantle, including the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (31 percent), the United States Agency for International Development (16 percent), and the Environmental Protection Agency (37 percent).

🤑 Cha-ching. The results are in: Wall Street made more money than ever last year, with the country’s biggest banks raking in billions of dollars in record profits. So much for all that whining about how overregulation is “crippling” business.

Here’s a Roosevelt Institute chart to think about as Congress considers extending the 2018 Trump tax cuts.

Trump tanks military stocks. Last week, the president exercised a rare moment of restraint and proposed a “de-nuking” strategy, telling reporters “there’’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons.” The president also said he wants to cut the Defense Department’s ~$900 million annual budget in half, which sent the stock valuation of defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman into a tailspin. Trump’s comments came just days after a Heritage Foundation report slammed the Pentagon’s $150,000 soap dispenser budget.

Eggs are displayed inside a store on Feb. 7, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

What’s in your omelet? The outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu has sent the price of eggs in the U.S. soaring, with the average cost of a dozen eggs up 53 percent in the last year — reaching a record high of $4.95 in January. The soaring cost of eggs accounted for roughly two-thirds of the total increase in food costs last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Too many eggs in one basket. The bird flu outbreak has forced farmers to cull over 30 million of the country’s egg-laying chickens. But get this: Only five corporations own 46 percent of commercial hens in the U.S. Cal-Maine, the country’s largest egg supplier, controls 20 percent of the market. After decades of consolidation, the suppliers making up Big Egg have edged out smaller farmers and dramatically decreased the national egg-laying flock while increasing egg production — in other words, extracting more eggs out of fewer chickens.

Big Egg’s Big Payday. Farmers say monopolization in the industry is exacerbating the egg crisis as H5N1 quickly spreads across corporate megafarms. Farm Action, a progressive agricultural advocacy group, accuses Big Egg, and in particular, Cal-Maine, of “leverag[ing] the crisis to raise prices, amass record profits, and consolidate market power.” Cal-Maine has seen its hundreds of millions in annual profits rise since the H5N1 outbreak first started in 2022 and used that cash to buy up even more of their competitors.

🍿 A new bill could force theaters to list movies’ actual start times. Because sometimes 30 minutes of previews is not necessary.

🦸 This absolutely wild Lever story has real Lex Luthor/Otisburg vibes. Where’s Superman when you need him?

😬 Hakeem Jefferies has a new nickname for Donald Trump. And it’s not very good.

“America is finally being run like a business: a business acquired by private equity that’s being stripped for parts before being liquidated.” — Podcaster Jesse Brenneman

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