The federal government last broke up the meatpacking monopoly in 1920. The industry is more concentrated now than it was then, and Washington has never had more proposals to fix it. None of them have moved.
Four companies control 85% of American beef processing today. That figure was 36% in 1980. Beef prices are up 15% year over year. Three competing approaches now sit on the table simultaneously.
On March 5, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer introduced the Family Grocery and Farmer Relief Act with twelve cosponsors. The bill would force the Big Four — Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef — to choose a single protein and divest the rest. The FTC would enforce concentration caps on beef markets and order divestitures when thresholds are exceeded.
A separate provision targets foreign-owned operations, specifically naming Brazilian-owned JBS and Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods. Both would be required to divest U.S. assets on a set timeline. The SBA would provide loans and assistance to cooperatives and small processors acquiring divested facilities.
Republicans from cattle states have pushed their own legislation for years, though none of it is new. Senators Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Chuck Grassley of Iowa reintroduced the bipartisan Meat and Poultry Special Investigators Act in April 2025 — a bill creating a USDA special investigator armed with subpoena power. It passed the Senate Agriculture Committee in 2022. The Republican majority has never brought it to a floor vote.
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced the Strengthening Antitrust Enforcement for Meatpacking Act in 2024 to set concentration thresholds under the Packers and Stockyards Act. It hasn’t moved either.
The Trump administration has moved on the executive side. On November 7, 2025, the president directed the DOJ to investigate the Big Four for collusion, price fixing, and price manipulation. A month later, he signed a broader executive order creating Food Supply Chain Security Task Forces at both the DOJ and FTC, with meat processing singled out for scrutiny.
But the same administration is dismantling the regulatory tools those investigations would rely on. In January 2026, USDA withdrew a proposed rule that would have defined “unfair practices” under the Packers and Stockyards Act — the century-old law the investigations are built on. In September 2025, USDA canceled its partnership with state attorneys general that supported antitrust enforcement in agricultural markets.
This is the second time a Trump administration has pulled an unfair-practices rule. The first term withdrew an Obama-era version. The investigations Trump ordered rely on the same statute whose enforcement definitions his USDA has now twice declined to finalize.
The Meat Institute, the industry’s trade group, calls the Schumer bill “absurd” and argues the real problem is supply. The U.S. cattle herd hit a 75-year low as of January 2026. Packers say they are losing more than $350 per head on beef.
Independent ranchers say that story has it backwards. R-CALF USA, the largest producer-only cattle trade association in the country, points to four decades of data showing the herd contraction is a product of concentration, not a defense against reform.
In 1980, the country had 1.3 million cattle farmers and ranchers. They maintained 37 million mother cows. Producers took home 63 cents of every consumer beef dollar.
By 2021, the industry had lost more than half its farms. It shed 9.5 million mother cows. The consumer dollar flipped — packers and retailers now take 63 cents, and producers get 37.
Over the same period, beef imports more than doubled as a share of domestic consumption. Foreign beef now accounts for 22% of what Americans eat — not supplementing domestic production but supplanting it.
Since 2017, imports rose 43%. Consumer beef prices climbed 42% over the same stretch.
R-CALF welcomed the Schumer bill and said the administration and Congress are aligned on the scope of the crisis.
But the Schumer bill has zero Republican cosponsors. The bipartisan bills that could pass sit without floor votes. Trump’s DOJ investigation carries no guarantee of structural results — prior probes under both Obama and Biden ended without accountability. Private lawsuits produced $87.5 million in settlements from Cargill and Tyson, but no structural change.
The meatpacking industry has outlasted every reform effort since the Reagan administration opened the door to consolidation in the 1980s. The tools exist — antitrust law, the Packers and Stockyards Act, FTC divestiture authority. The political consensus exists. What does not exist is a single instance, in four decades, of Washington using any of them.
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