California argues federal challenge to chicken rules suffers from ‘fatal flaw’

California argues federal challenge to chicken rules suffers from ‘fatal flaw’

Published 2:30 pm Friday, July 10, 2026

California’s government claims the Trump administration’s revised lawsuit against its chicken housing regulations suffers from the same defects as the original complaint and must be dismissed.

Last year, the Trump administration filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that California’s restrictions on confining hens are pre-empted by a national law governing egg inspections.

The rules are meant to ensure egg-laying chickens are raised with adequate living space, but the Trump administration argues the restrictions adversely affect out-of-state producers and drive up egg prices.

Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Michael Scarsi in Los Angeles dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the federal government lacks standing to pursue to the case because it hadn’t suffered a “sovereign injury” from California’s regulations.

However, the complaint was dismissed without prejudice, allowing the Trump administration to amend its legal theory and potentially establish standing to move forward with the litigation.

Revised complaint

The federal government did file such a revised complaint but attorneys for California argue that the “United States fails, for the second time, to allege a concrete injury,” which warrants dismissing the lawsuit without permitting further amendments.

As decided in the previous dismissal ruling, the federal government does not suffer an “injury to its sovereignty” whenever a state passes a statute that’s potentially pre-empted by federal law, according to California.

Despite this finding, the U.S. government has again “put all its eggs in the sovereign-injury theory of standing” with its amended complaint, which “fails for all the reasons the Court has already explained,” the state said in a legal brief.

Though the revised lawsuit does contain some new allegations referring to California’s implementation and enforcements of the chicken housing regulations, none of these “disjointed additions” rectifies the “fatal flaw” with the federal government’s initial case, the brief said.

The revised lawsuit claims the state law is detrimental to “regulated parties,” but it doesn’t claim the federal government itself is a “participant in the egg marketplace” that’s affected by the rules, according to California.

The revised lawsuit also references the California statute’s impact on interstate commerce without actually seeking relief on those grounds, as the chicken housing regulations have already been found to pass constitutional muster by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023, the brief said.

“Despite the Court’s guidance, the United States has failed to allege any facts showing the enforcement mechanisms’ impact on the operations of the federal government,” California’s attorneys argued.

The federal government replied that the amended complaint resolves any concern that the injury to the U.S. is merely theoretical, arguing that the lawsuit seeks to redress an actual sovereign injury.

“It makes clear that the United States does not challenge a dormant or obsolete law sitting unused on the books,” the federal government said. “It challenges an active state regulatory regime that California administers and enforces through mechanisms backed by civil and criminal sanctions.”

California’s regulatory scheme “interferes with the United States’ sovereign prerogatives” because it curtails the federal government’s ability to enforce national law, which seeks to impose uniform standards for eggs across state lines, the federal government said.

The federal government has established standing by showing that California’s regulatory scheme burdens “nationally utilized egg-production methods” by restricting sales from states that don’t have similar confinement restrictions, the brief said.

It’s not necessary for the federal government to show its operations have been hindered by a state law to bring a lawsuit for pre-emption, as this would effectively prevent any civil rights litigation filed by the United States, according to the brief.

“No one has ever seriously questioned the United States’ standing in those contexts. And that is because those suits vindicate sovereign interests in the enforcement of federal law and the supremacy of Congress’s enactments. So too here,” the federal government said. “This Court must reject a theory of standing that would cast doubt on vast swaths of such federal enforcement litigation.”