On Monday, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, and the manufacturing policy director Pete Navarro held a joint press conference to provide an update on their antitrust investigation of the Big Four meatpackers, which combined control more than 85 percent of the U.S. beef processing market. This investigation began with President Donald Trump's November request, in which he accused the packers of "driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation." Blanche said his department has reviewed more than 3 million documents and contacted hundreds of ranchers, cattlemen, producers and processors in the six months since.

With this action the administration is taking on hardcore government investigation– and litigation-survivors. The largest of the packers, JBS, is a Brazilian conglomerate whose owners pled guilty in 2020 to a bribery scheme that financed their original entry into the American market. In 2023, the Biden Antitrust Division filed a civil suit against Agri Stats, the data intermediary the packers allegedly used to coordinate; that same year, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced legislation to break up meatpacking, and U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), in his capacity as then-Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, investigated JBS for "turning a blind eye as parts of its supply chain burn down the Amazon, push the world toward climate catastrophe, and undercut American ranchers". More recently, not to be outdone by the Trump administration, Senate Democrats led by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer have introduced their own legislation to break up the dominant meatpackers. And McDonald's, Target, Kroger, Sysco—everybody who is anybody is suing the Big Four.

All Americans should pray for their breakup. But even that won't be enough. Antitrust needs to be paired with tariff protection if American ranchers can finally enjoy a functioning home market. Ranchers need certainty as to how much of their home market will be traded away to imports if they're going to set about rebuilding.

The Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF USA), an association of independent ranchers that itself launched a class action lawsuit in 2019 against the packers, details the depth of the hole we find ourselves in. The U.S. cattle herd today is 86 million head—smaller than it was in 1951, when only 154 million Americans relied on it instead of today's 340 million. The herd peaked at 132 million in the mid-1970s and has been shrinking ever since, even as the population it has to supply more than doubled. The calf crop is the smallest since 1941. Almost three-quarters of lamb and close to 20 percent of beef consumed in America are imported. Between 2017 and 2022, more than 106,000 beef-cattle operations disappeared. Of every 10 ranchers in business in 1980, fewer than five remain.

Brazilian beef imports are surging so far in 2026, up 21 percent from a year ago. And 2025 itself was a record for Brazilian beef shipments to the U.S., topping $1.75 billion, up 39 percent from 2024.

A generation ago, the American rancher kept 63 cents of every consumer dollar spent on beef; the packer and retailer split the remaining 37. By 2021, those numbers had inverted. Today the rancher receives 37 cents and the middle of the chain takes 63.