BREAKING: In a massive move against the meat packing Monopoly, President Trump is…

President Trump moved on Friday to break the stranglehold that a handful of massive, foreign-owned meatpacking corporations have held over America’s cattle producers for decades, directing his administration to draft legal documents that would let farmers and ranchers process and sell their own meat.

The announcement came in a Truth Social post that pulled no punches. Trump described the current meatpacking system as a “nasty monopoly” controlled by essentially four companies, and he noted pointedly that much of that ownership sits outside the United States. “So, in order to break this powerful monopoly, with much of its ownership based outside of the U.S., I am authorizing legal documents to be drawn in order to allow Farmers and Ranchers to be given the right to PROCESS THEIR OWN FOOD,” he wrote.

The numbers back up his frustration. According to the Department of Agriculture, four companies, Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS USA, and National Beef Packing Co., control roughly 85 percent of all fed cattle processing in the United States. JBS is Brazilian-owned. National Beef is majority owned by Brazil’s Marfrig. For a country that prides itself on food independence, having the vast majority of its beef supply chain run through a near monopoly with substantial foreign ownership is a national security concern as much as an economic one.

This is not a new complaint from cattle country, but it took a conversation with conservative radio host and rancher Glenn Beck to push it to the top of the president’s agenda. Beck raised the issue directly with Trump earlier in the week, calling federal meat processing inspections “insane” and describing the current system as a “meat processing cartel” that is “killing us.” Two days later, Trump directed his administration to act.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wasted no time signaling that the administration intends to move fast. “We are on it Mr. President!” she posted, promising a series of announcements starting the following Monday. Those plans reportedly include waiving certain red tape provisions, expanding ranchers’ ability to sell beef across state lines, and rescinding what she called outdated federal guidance that has long hemmed in smaller producers.

For independent ranchers who have watched their margins get squeezed for years while the big four processors post steady profits, this is the kind of direct intervention many have been asking for since well before Trump’s second term began. Small and mid sized cattle operations have long argued that federal inspection requirements, while well intentioned, effectively lock them out of interstate commerce and force them to sell into a market dominated by a handful of buyers with enormous pricing power.

Under current law, the picture is more nuanced than Trump’s critics have suggested. The Federal Meat Inspection Act already allows for personal use and custom slaughter exemptions, meaning a rancher can legally process an animal for the use of the owner’s household, employees, or nonpaying guests. What ranchers cannot currently do, in most cases, is sell that meat commercially without routing it through a federally inspected facility or a state-inspected one that limits sales to within that state’s borders.

There is a narrow existing pathway called the Cooperative Interstate Shipment program that allows small state inspected processors to sell across state lines, but participation remains limited, and the bureaucratic hurdles to qualify are significant. Trump’s directive appears aimed at expanding that kind of access dramatically, giving smaller operators a realistic shot at competing without needing to build or access a massive federally inspected plant.

Predictably, the meatpacking industry itself is not thrilled. The Meat Institute, which represents the country’s largest processors, including the very companies Trump singled out, issued a statement warning that “expanding processing opportunities does not come at the expense of food safety.” The group argued that federal and state inspection requirements exist for good reason, to ensure meat sold to American families is safe, wholesome, and properly labeled.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association also weighed in with caution, writing that “weakening federal meat inspection and food safety standards isn’t the answer” and arguing that America’s cattle producers have earned consumer trust over generations that should not be put at risk for what the group characterized as a short-term political fix. The association instead argued that expanding the national cattle herd, rather than deregulating processing, is the better path to lowering beef prices.

It is worth noting that these are precisely the industry groups whose members stand to lose market share if smaller, more localized processing becomes commercially viable. Their objections, while framed in the language of food safety, also happen to align neatly with their financial interest in preserving the current concentrated market structure. That does not make their safety concerns automatically wrong, but it is a relevant piece of context that deserves mention.

Trump, notably, did not sign a final executive order on Friday. What he authorized was the drafting of legal documents, meaning the specific mechanics, which statutes would be invoked, which federal agencies would oversee the new framework, and what inspection standards would still apply remain to be worked out. That has left some uncertainty about exactly how sweeping the final policy will be.

The administration has been careful not to suggest that food safety inspections will simply disappear. Rollins’s own statement emphasized waiving “outdated guidance” and expanding market access rather than eliminating oversight altogether. That framing suggests the goal is a smarter, more modernized inspection regime rather than a wholesale rollback of safety standards, though critics on the left have already begun mischaracterizing the move as an attack on food safety writ large.

This latest push comes amid broader friction over Trump’s beef policy. The administration had drawn criticism from cattle groups earlier this year over decisions related to beef imports, moves aimed at lowering consumer prices that some ranchers felt came at their expense. Friday’s announcement can be read in part as a response to that blowback, an effort to show cattle producers that the administration is willing to fight for their interests even while also working to keep grocery store prices in check for everyday families.

Beef prices have been a persistent sore spot for American consumers, and Trump has faced pressure from both directions, ranchers who feel squeezed by processors and grocery buyers who are frustrated by high prices at the meat counter. Breaking up the processing bottleneck, rather than simply importing more foreign beef, offers a path that could theoretically satisfy both constituencies over time by increasing domestic processing capacity and competition.

Rural communities, many of which supported Trump by wide margins in 2024, stand to benefit most directly if this initiative follows through. Local, small-scale meat processing has long been touted by agricultural conservatives as a way to keep more of the value chain and the associated jobs and revenue, within farming communities rather than funneling it through a small number of corporate processing hubs often located far from where the cattle are actually raised.