President Donald Trump on Friday claimed grocery and gas prices are falling, an assertion he’s made repeatedly since taking office.
In a post on social media, Trump touted the price levels alongside job growth and tax revenue in a list of gains delivered by his tariff policy.
“We’re only in a TRANSITION STAGE, just getting started!!!” Trump said.
The claim of a reduction in prices for those essential goods, however, is potentially misleading, economists told ABC News. Since Trump took office, price hikes for food have accelerated and gas prices have stood essentially flat, federal government data shows.
To be sure, overall inflation has eased slightly during Trump’s tenure. In January, the year-over-year inflation rate stood at 3%; as of March, the most recent month on record, that rate registered at 2.4%, government data showed. That figure comes in well below a peak attained in 2022.
Even a relatively low level of inflation indicates an increase in price levels, however, since inflation measures the pace of change in prices, David Bieri, an economist at Virginia Tech University, told ABC News.
“Prices are still going up – they’re just not going up as rapidly,” Bieri told ABC News.
Grocery prices
On April 24, Trump told reporters at the Oval Office: “Groceries are down.” Trump repeated the claim on social media on Friday, saying, “Groceries (and eggs!) down.”
Grocery prices, which make up a significant share of household budgets, are measured in government price data under the category of “food at home,” which sets such items apart from those purchased at restaurants or other dine-out venues.
In January, food at home prices increased 1.9% compared to a year earlier. As of March, the year-over-year inflation rate for such products had accelerated to 2.4%, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed.
When asked about Trump’s claim that food prices are falling, Tucker Balch, a finance professor at Emory University, said: “I’m not aware of any data that supports that.”
Egg prices — another cost highlighted by Trump — have climbed over the early months of Trump’s term. In March, egg prices soared 60% higher than a year prior, BLS data showed.
Bird flu has continued to decimate the egg supply, lifting prices, researchers at the University of Tennessee and Mississippi State University found in February.
By contrast, wholesale egg prices — the amount grocers pay to suppliers — have dropped significantly since Trump took office, food economists previously told ABC News. It remains unclear when and to what extent that decline in wholesale egg prices will translate into relief for consumers, they said.
While food prices are rising overall, costs for some food items are dropping. Staples like rice, pasta, potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes registered lower prices in March than they had a year prior, BLS data showed.
“You can always find particular food prices that are falling,” Carola Binder, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies inflation, told ABC News. “There are probably some people out there whose basket of prices is falling because of what they’re buying.”
Gas prices
Trump claimed last month that gasoline prices had fallen as low as $1.98 in a couple of states. On Friday, Trump voiced a similar assertion on social media, saying, “Gasoline just broke $1.98 a Gallon, lowest in years.”
The nationwide average price of a gallon of gasoline stands at $3.18, AAA data shows. No state boasts an average price close to $1.98, the data shows.
In Mississippi, the state with the lowest average price, a gallon of gas costs $2.66, AAA says.
Even more, government data shows average gas prices are little changed since Trump took office.
Over the week ending on Jan. 20, the national average price of a gallon of gas stood at $3.10, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA. As of the week ending on April 28, the most recent on record, the average price landed at $3.13, EIA says.
“That puts gas prices right around where they were when Trump took office,” Binder said.
By contrast, oil prices have plummeted about 25% since Trump took office. In theory, the decline in the price of oil should eventually push down the price of gasoline, since oil makes up the key input in the refined product that ends up in vehicles, Binder said.
The drop in oil prices is not necessarily a positive indicator, they added. Falling oil prices often suggest expectations of an economic slowdown that would diminish energy demand.
Balch, of Emory University, said the decline in oil prices resulted from expectations of a slowdown in global trade in the aftermath of Trump’s tariffs.
“It’s a measure of the expected use of energy in our economy,” Balch said. “It is because of Trump’s policies but it’s not an endorsement of his policies.”
