Washington, D.C. — In response to news that the Trump-Vance Department of Justice reached a settlement in its price fixing lawsuit against Indiana-based firm Agri Stats, the American Economic Liberties Project released the following statement.

“For two decades, Agri Stats hiked food prices by sharing thousands of granular data points among the nation’s largest meat processors, and they’ve avoided a public trial with a slap on the wrist,” said Lee Hepner, Senior Legal Counsel at American Economic Liberties Project. “This is a deeply entrenched cartel in a highly concentrated market that won’t be resolved with little tweaks. Instead of shutting down Agri Stats’ business and deterring these cartel managers from popping up in every other industry, the Justice Department is asking Agri Stats if they can be a bit more discreet.”

Yesterday’s settlement in the Agri Stats case was reached just weeks after the DOJ took separate action, in the middle of a jury trial, to settle its monopolization case against Live Nation, raising serious questions about the Trump-Vance DOJ’s commitment to monopoly oversight. The trial against Agri Stats had previously been scheduled to begin on May 18, 2026

“The Department of Justice had a winning case that was supposed to reframe how we think about data exchanges and once again settled on the cusp of trial,” Hepner continued. “The trend for decades has been to protect upstream financial investment from the risk of competition. But the erosion of competition has saddled consumers with higher prices and more frequent shortages. If we can’t bring ironclad cases like this one to trial, the pattern of casual collusion will continue.”

In September 2023, Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), alongside a bipartisan coalition of six state attorneys general, filed a lawsuit against Agri Stats for organizing and managing anticompetitive practices among meat processors. The DOJ and states alleged Agri Stats colluded with America’s largest chicken, pork, and turkey processors to limit production and raise prices. 

The decades-long scheme allegedly involved comprehensively collecting and distributing meat processor information — including prices, costs, output, wages, and extremely granular industry-specific data — enabling the same processors to anticipate and track their competitors’ production levels while withholding this data from meat purchasers and other actors in the supply chain. Further, Agri Stats’ consulting service assigned individual employees to simultaneously advise multiple competing processors to raise their prices. Participating processors accounted for more than 90% of broiler chicken sales, 80% of pork sales, and 90% of turkey sales in the United States. According to the DOJ complaint, Agri Stats used its consulting business to advise processors to raise prices.

2016 Cargill presentation cited in DOJ’s complaint

Last month, the case cleared a key hurdle when the court denied Agri Stats’ motion for summary judgement. A bench trial before Minnesota federal court was scheduled for May 18, 2026, but was postponed as the DOJ and states advanced settlement discussions.

The May 7 Proposed Final Judgment, which constitutes the proposed settlement, was joined by the same six states who joined the complaint in 2023. Its key provisions would:

• Restricts the circumstances in which meat processors may share certain categories of nonpublic information with Agri Stats, but does not prohibit processors from making competitively sensitive information public by posting it on a website or elsewhere, allowing them to evade the thrust of the settlement.
• Allows Agri Stats to continue issuing Sales Reports and other Non-Sales Reports, including reports advising individual processors how they compare with competitors on key metrics.
• Requires Agri Stats to expand access to its reports on equal terms to other entities in the food supply chain, including distributors and retailers.
• Allows Agri Stats to continue assigning consultants to meet with competitor meat processors, subject only to an unenforceable commitment to avoid giving price advice.

The Proposed Final Judgment is subject to the Tunney Act, which requires the judge to determine that it is consistent with the public interest. Despite the intent of Congress when adopting the Tunney Act, certain courts have restricted their independent judgment to the extent it interferes with prosecutorial discretion. In March 2026, Senator Klobuchar introduced the Antitrust Accountability and Transparency Act, designed to reinforce the intent of the Tunney Act to ensure that consent decrees remedy the alleged anticompetitive harms.

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