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Everyone likes a good steak or a high-quality hamburger, but very soon they could be hard to find and extremely expensive if you can find one, right here in America land of plenty of beef may be nearly inaccessible. In fall 2025, Americans face a beef shortage not seen since before 1951, when cattle numbers reached 82.08 million head, compared to just 28.2 million head in 2025. This decline has driven prices skyward, turning a dietary staple into a luxury. Ground beef, once $3.50 per pound, now exceeds $6 in many areas, with steaks and roasts posting double digit price increases, per USDA data.

A combination of restrictive environmental regulations, escalating production costs, elevated livestock feed prices, and a New World Screwworm outbreak in southern and eastern Mexico where flesh-eating larvae threaten livestock has disrupted supply chains. Beef from northern Mexico appears to be untainted as ranchers there seek testing to prove this to officials at the US Agriculture Department.

Consumers are turning to cheaper cuts raising concerns about how America’s beef industry reached this crisis and what steps can restore affordability as well as abundance. The roots of the beef shortage trace back to a series of policy decisions, economic pressures, and global events.

The 2015 Clean Water Rule passed under the Obama administration, later expanded under the Biden-Harris administration in 2023, tightened regulations on Waters of the United States (WOTUS), restricting access to grazing lands for ranchers. Climate-smart initiatives from the Inflation Reduction Act, imposed costly compliance measures, such as methane reduction programs, on an already strained industry. These regulations of prioritizing environmental goals over food security, have handcuffed ranchers, forcing some to sell off cattle rather than navigate the financial burden.

Domestic and Global economic factors have added to this crisis. Feed prices for soybeans and corn have risen 20–25% since 2021 due to global supply chain disruptions, exacerbating costs for U.S. ranchers disruptions and the war in Ukraine, starting in 2022, spiked costs an additional 30%. Fuel and labor costs, amplified by inflation reaching a high of 8% in 2022, have strained agricultural operations. High interest rates on loans have limited reinvestment in herds, all while labor shortages and pandemic-era spending have reduced farm productivity and increased operational costs, threatening the sustainability of small and mid-sized farms. This resulted in plummeting U.S. cattle inventory, down to 28.2 million head in 2025, with a 10% drop from 2019. Beef production is projected to fall to 26.4 billion pounds in 2025, a 2.1% decline from 2024, while overall food prices have risen 3.4% this year, cooling from an 11% peak in 2022.

Trade policies have played a minor role as the U.S. resumed beef imports from Argentina in 2015 after a 14-year ban due to foot-and-mouth disease, with strict quotas and veterinary inspections ensuring compliance with safety standards, with imports scaling up gradually. The President recently announced that he would increase beef quotas from Argentina after meeting with Argentine President Javier Milei.

Since the 1994 NAFTA agreement, Mexico has been a vital supplier of live cattle to the U.S., typically providing over 1.1 million head annually. However, an ongoing New World Screwworm outbreak in southern Mexico, with cases detected as far north as Veracruz have prompted a U.S. suspension of cattle imports starting May 11, 2025, which remains active with no full resumption announced. In 2024, the U.S. imported 1.52 million metric tons of beef, with Australia (24.3%), Canada (22.6%), Brazil (12.7%), Mexico (14.4%), and Argentina (2.1%) leading the pack. Projections for 2025 show imports rising to 1.71 million metric tons, with Australia’s share increasing to 26.8% and Canada’s dropping to 18.6%.

Despite these imports, they haven’t been enough to offset domestic shortages, and the impact of the beef shortage is hitting consumers hard. Families are facing sticker shock at grocery stores, with many opting for cheaper proteins like chicken or pork. Restaurants, particularly small businesses, are cutting beef-heavy dishes or raising prices. The crisis is driving a cultural change in a country where steak now symbolizes wealth.

For ranchers, the prospects vary. While higher beef prices offer short-term gains, the costs of feed, fuel, and compliance remain sky-high, deterring new ranchers, slowing the rebuild of new herds. Cattle production is a long-term commitment, and growth cycles take years. The USDA estimated beef prices will rise another 3.2% in 2025, with per capita consumption dropping to 55 pounds by 2026. Relief may come by 2026 if herds rebound and global markets stabilize, but there’s no quick fix.

President Trump issued two memoranda on January 20, 2025: Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost-of-Living Crisis, which directed deregulatory measures to combat inflationary pressures, including rising food prices, and America First Trade Policy, which focused on boosting U.S. industry competitiveness.

President Trump took immediate action directing the EPA to withdraw its proposed Clean Water Act effluent guidelines for the meat and poultry sector, while targeting the cancellation of USDA regulations regarding payments to poultry growers, and DEI-related provisions in agricultural regulations to slash compliance costs and boost operational efficiency for beef producers. He also enacted energy policy adjustments via Executive Order 14156, declaring a national energy emergency to expand domestic drilling and lower fuel prices, alongside aggressive trade enforcement via phased-in tariffs on Mexican, Canadian, and Chinese imports to shield U.S. beef from foreign competition.

Furthermore, Trump has initiated herd rebuilding incentives with low-interest USDA loans and Farm Service Agency tax credits, simplifying labor reforms to ease H-2A visa processes amid shortages, and pursued export market expansion through new negotiations with Japan and the EU. All of this, paired with broader tariff strategies aimed at curbing inflation and stabilizing the price of beef for American families.

The beef shortage serves as an alert for America’s food supply chain, it highlights the need for collective solutions, deregulation, cost-efficient practices, and sharper trade policies to ensure a stable and resilient beef industry. As Americans navigate the Supermarket for beef, they are presented with a broader challenge. The real issue isn’t just rationing, it’s building resilience to ensure great steaks remain a staple, not a luxury, in the land of plenty.

Under Democrat rule in at least one state, the Left is coddling violent felons, showering them with psychiatrists and education, and then acting surprised when they kill people when they’re released.

Whistleblowers from Michigan have reached out to Stone Cold Truth to describe how liberal criminal justice policies are allowing prisoners, including the worst “Level 5” offenders, to terrorize prison guards, consume dangerous drugs behind bars, and then get out and reoffend.

These whistleblowers are calling for the Michigan state legislature to go over the state’s Department of Corrections budget with a fine tooth comb because of the obscene amounts of money the left is spending to coddle violent inmates.

One shocking example, Dexter D. Tolliver, brutally beat an old man to death at age 15 and, when incarcerated, was into “self mutilation.” They reportedly had to make special restraints for this monster so that he would not rip open his stomach to stuff things inside.

But the prison guards would have to take him weekly for his psychiatry appointments and for his education classes so that he could learn to become a better citizen. And then he was released after 40 years. This violent felon obsessed with self-mutilation was a free man. He promptly went down to Georgia and raped an elderly woman.

The left felt sad that he had been in prison since he was 15, even though he killed a man. And they take no responsibility for the fact he was released and within months brutalized an older woman. The media refers to individuals such as Tolliver as “juvenile lifers” as a gambit to build sympathy for these ruthless thugs.

The problem is not the judges, whistleblowers say, because the Michigan Department of Corrections is simply not telling judges the full truth about how bad some of these inmates are. The administration, who all report to far-left Governor Gretchen Whitmer, wants to be seen as “sufficiently progressive” and that they believe in “restorative justice.” This is how they keep their jobs and move up the ladder in the Whitmer regime.

Toliver is far from an aberration. Instances include not just violent felons, but also felons who have been specifically violent while in prison. It is a common occurrence for these charming individuals to hurl feces at prison guards.

The Michigan Prison system director, Heidi E. Washington, has been on a hiring spree to put psychiatrists in the facility. Whereas only a few years ago, they had one psychiatrist and four nurses, the same facility now has dozens of psychiatrists who are all earning hundreds per hour while the guards top out at $30 per hour with benefits, for dealing with some of the worst elements in society.

It has been a major problem that the leftists in power want to hire mental health treatment rather than actual prison guards to the point of chronic understaffing. Our sources tell us that it is not uncommon to have eight psychiatrists in a meeting with four prisoners. They’re essentially wasting millions of taxpayer money to create make-work jobs for their left-wing friends.

They are making America less safe because they follow left-wing values that never hold violent criminals responsible or accountable for their actions. The left, which used to at least pretend to care about working folks – the blue collar guys working tough dirty jobs every day – are even letting inmates’ lawyers smuggle drugs into the facility and have done so for the past three years.

Whistleblowers tell us that many lawyers affix “wasp spray” onto papers, and then the inmates smoke the paper to get high. The facilities will not even give the guards the masks they need to prevent inhaling this toxic stew, and guards are dropping to the floor and being carted out and then being told they have to report to work the next day.

Additionally, most facilities employ an Athletic Director even though there is no athletic program to speak of, and no possibility it might ever come to fruition. The left is simply making more jobs for its people, to put them on the state payroll with state benefits despite doing no actual work. If they can justify it, they will perpetrate it and expand their program of deviance without shame.

Whistleblowers have contacted the local media but they have refused to report it to the masses. The public does not know how bad it is, and how it is only going to get worse. The lives of the prison guards as well as the general public are put in jeopardy due to this out-of-control system. Until patriots take control of our governments and eliminate all left-wing policies systemically across the country, the people will never be safe.

The system must hold these nefarious actors and institutions accountable, or they will not hesitate to abuse their authority again as soon as they get the chance.

A criminal indictment has been announced for former FBI Director James Comey, while Democrats complain incredulously about the abuse of power from the Trump administration. According to their rhetoric, the administration’s actions are autocratic, unconstitutional, and acts of political vengeance. Trump, they say, is on a rampage of Revenge and Retribution.

Those who accuse Donald Trump of weaponizing the criminal justice system to “go after” his political enemies, and who claim that he is trying to limit the free speech of his critics, are in fact describing precisely what they themselves have done over the last twelve years.

Donald Trump’s drive to prosecute the cabal of criminals — who, based on declassified documents and House investigations, most definitely launched a seditious conspiracy — includes fabricating evidence to justify spying on candidate Donald Trump, fabricating evidence of Russian collusion, and staging two impeachment trials. One of those trials was specifically designed to cover up the corruption of Joe Biden as vice president. They also colluded with state prosecutors in Georgia, Nevada, and New York to fabricate crimes in those jurisdictions in an attempt to bankrupt him, keep him off the ballot in all 50 states, and push him into prison.

To be clear, thanks to the vigorous declassifications by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, we now know that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, John Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper, Rod Rosenstein, Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, Lisa Monico, and Norm Eisen, among others, engaged in an illegal coup against President Donald Trump, as well as using the full authority of the government remove him from the presidency and to later try to destroy his second successful candidacy.

The Democrats and their handmaidens in the media who are whining today about Trump’s “Revenge Tour” hope the American people have amnesia. They egregiously abused both the law and the U.S. Constitution in their maniacal drive to destroy Donald Trump and his supporters—myself included. Once again, they are guilty of exactly what they accuse us of.

Democrats accuse the opposition of doing all the things they themselves have done. They seem to believe that their lies can put the American public into an amnesiac trance, leading the masses to completely forget what has happened over the past eight years. This is an Orwellian sleight of hand of horrifying magnitude — a gaslighting attempt of mind-boggling proportions. As the outrageousness of their abuse of power is exposed, they increasingly claim that holding them responsible amounts to “retribution.”

The New York tsunami of lawfare against Trump is particularly contrived. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg convicted Trump in the so-called “hush money” case without ever identifying the underlying crime Trump was supposedly guilty of.

In New York, Attorney General Letitia James prosecuted Trump under a state law that had never before been used in this way, accusing him of overvaluing assets to secure real estate development loans—loans he fully repaid, on time, while his creditors collected $40 million in interest. James herself is now hoist on her own petard, having been exposed in a forty-three–year spree of mortgage and bank fraud, and for failing to disclose $400,000 in mortgages on a property assessed at just $150,000.

Democrats in the New York State Legislature even changed state law to extend the statute of limitations so that E. Jean Carroll could file her dubious civil sexual assault claim against Trump. Carroll paraded around in the designer dress she claimed to have worn during the alleged assault—only to be confronted with the fact that the dress had not yet been designed or marketed at the time of the alleged incident. Her bizarre admission to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that she finds “sex sexy,” combined with her pattern of making serious allegations against multiple men, further underscores the baselessness of her case, which is now on appeal. Ironically, when Democrats extended the law for Carroll’s benefit, they also ensnared former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Eric Adams, who now face sexual harassment civil suits under the very same statute.

They coordinated actively with state Democrat officials in an effort to invent crimes against Trump and his supporters. For example, the formation of slates of alternate electors pending the outcome of a disputed election is not a crime — but they made it one after the fraudulent 2020 presidential election. Special Counsel Jack Smith actually turned questioning the outcome of an election, a right protected by the First Amendment, into a supposed criminal offense and worked to charge Trump and his supporters in various states.

At the same time, the Federal government worked hand in glove with shady, dark-money-funded nonprofits to disbar any lawyer who dared to represent Donald Trump or his supporters, including Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the extraordinarily capable Jeff Clark. Federal entities also worked hand in glove with the largest Internet platforms to cancel and censor anyone who supported Trump or questioned the integrity of the Mueller Witch Hunt or the outcome of the 2020 election.

I famously wrote a letter to the president after the 2024 election in which I urged him to grant a pardon to every well-known Republican, including members of his staff, as well as members of the Senate and the House who had publicly questioned the election. I predicted the Democrats would try to make this a crime. My critics said I wanted a second pardon for my activities on January 6, which is ridiculous, because the FBI has determined that I had nothing whatsoever to do with the controversial events of that day. Any claim that I knew in advance about, participated in, or condoned any illegal activity at the Capitol on January 6 is false. I also had no involvement in the effort to delay the vote of the Electoral College, although I believe such activities to be constitutionally legal.

The vast majority of protesters on January 6 did not commit violence, but many of their lives were upended for merely taking a stroll through the Capitol after law enforcement opened the doors. Hundreds of federal agents in the audience fanned the flames in a coordinated, clandestine operation to entrap Trump supporters and frame them as insurrectionists. They twisted the law to indict many. They twisted the law to indict many. They even relied on a novel federal charge — “obstruction of an official proceeding” under 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) — a vestige of the Enron trial, where corrupt federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann’s convictions were unanimously overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court (9–0). This overly broad statute was then weaponized by D.C. prosecutors and judges to unjustly charge and incarcerate many — until the Supreme Court finally rejected its use.

The misappropriation of this law was clearly promoted by one of the chief architects of the Russian Collusion Hoax, the stolen election, and the 2024 lawfare against Trump — Andrew Weissmann himself. Those convicted were abused and tortured.

They illegally spied on Trump’s presidential campaign and later spied on eight of his supporters in the U.S. Senate. All of this was part of a sordid electoral interference plot — the greatest open-air conspiracy in the history of mankind — with the goal of keeping President Trump off the ballot in all 50 states.

Any other man would have succumbed to the machinations of this devious scheme. President Trump, however, was able to defy the odds in an almost superhuman manner to overcome the insurmountable, even surviving an assassination attempt when a sniper was incomprehensibly allowed a free shot at his head as Secret Service agents stood idly by. In light of this incredible string of events, the mandate is for justice to be served through an unprecedented crackdown against those who turned America upside down in their desperate attempts to cling to power.

The extra-legal efforts of Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was directed by Attorney General Merrick Garland and President Joe Biden to “get Trump,” are breathtaking. Smith actually convinced a sitting federal judge to order Donald Trump’s personal attorney Evan Corcoran to both testify against him and turn over legal documents protected by attorney-client privilege. This is a clear and outrageous violation of the Sixth Amendment, which would never have withstood Supreme Court review.

Smith also took the very rare step of presenting his evidence against Donald Trump in the so-called “documents case” to a D.C. grand jury and then had the testimony read to a Florida grand jury in order to secure indictments there since the raid took place at Mar-a-Lago. No lawyer I consulted thought this would pass muster, given the inability of Florida grand jurors to ask questions. It is yet another example of Jack Smith bending the rules in his mania to get Donald Trump.

In the Soviet-style show trial that I faced in Washington D.C., the judge specifically prohibited my lawyers from arguing that I had been selectively prosecuted or that there were political motives in my case. I was also gagged unconstitutionally because the judge said my public defense of myself might “taint the jury pool.” She extended the gag to my wife and entire family.

I appealed her gag ruling to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which sat on it for eight months only to reject it days before my trial, saying it was not ripe for decision because I had not yet asked the judge who placed the gag order on me to remove it — which, of course, she never would have done. It took them eight months to give me this response as I continued to sustain damage from the daily attacks of CNN and the Washington Post.

Within 24 hours of my arrest at dawn, I was handcuffed and taken to a federal courthouse in shackles and leg irons. James Comey, by contrast, was allowed to slip in the back door of the courthouse for arraignment on the date of his choosing.

Simply put, levying criminal charges against those responsible for these crimes is not about retribution. It is about justice and renewing faith in national institutions. The low IQ Obama impersonator, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, has threatened to use the criminal justice system against Republicans if the Democrats return to power — as if they hadn’t already tried to use it and will do so again if unwisely given power.

The system must hold these nefarious actors and institutions accountable, or they will not hesitate to abuse their authority again as soon as they get the chance. This is not about revenge or retribution — it is about accountability and justice.

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WHO IS ROGER STONE?
Roger Stone is a seasoned political operative, speaker, pundit, and New York Times Bestselling Author featured in the Netflix documentary Get Me Roger Stone.
Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump—all of these Presidents relied on Roger Stone to secure their seat in the Oval Office. In a 45-year career in American politics, Stone has worked on over 700 campaigns for public office.
“Roger’s a good guy. He is a patriot and believesin a strong nation, and a lot of other things I believe in.”

– President Donald J. Trump
Stone’s bestselling books include The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJThe Bush Crime FamilyThe Clintons’ War on WomenThe Making of The President—How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution, and Stone’s Rules with a forward by Tucker Carlson.
For the last 15 years, Roger Stone has published his International Best & Worst Dressed List. Stone is considered an authority on political and corporate strategy, branding, marketing, messaging, and advertising.
Stone is the host of The StoneZONE on Rumble and is also the host of The Roger Stone Show on WABC Radio.

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