Whopper of the Week: Yes, RFK Jr., your cuts did weaken the Cyclospora response

Whopper of the Week: 

YES, RFK JR., YOUR CUTS DID WEAKEN THE CYCLOSPORA RESPONSE

SUMMARY

Forty-five states are struggling to contain the largest Cyclospora outbreak in US history against a backdrop of cuts to food safety resources and dwindling support from the federal government. Despite extensive evidence to the contrary, Secretary Kennedy claims that there has been an effective federal response to the food-borne parasite outbreak and says that it is now “under control.” He dismissed the suggestion that Trump administration cuts hampered the response. “Those criticisms are invalid,” Kennedy said at a July press conference. “We’ve had no cuts in our surveillance program.” In reality, since Kennedy took office, a perfect storm of program cancellations, staffing cuts, and deregulation has significantly undermined the nation’s food safety programs.
 

WHY IS THIS A WHOPPER?

As of July 25, there have been more than 18,000 cases, and nearly 12,000 confirmed cases, of cyclosporiasis reported to the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), with two reported deaths. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg, since they do not include people infected with Cyclospora who are asymptomatic, people who have symptoms but do not see a health provider, people who are not tested, and people whose tests are pending. Although a lag in response is to be expected given the parasite’s two-week incubation period, the numbers are unprecedented (see Figure below from the Yale School of Public Health). 

Recalls of lettuce originating in Central Mexico have been implemented, but there is as yet no evidence that the outbreak is under control, with numbers continuing to rise, and multiple new clusters emerging that appear unrelated to lettuce.  

While food safety has been underfunded for decades, the Trump administration has actively cut not only surveillance, but other key elements of the US food safety system. Susan Mayne, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, described how multiple Trump administration decisions have cumulatively weakened food safety, including: 

• Staff cuts at key agencies: The administration has made high-impact cuts to personnel at both FDA and CDC, undermining each agency’s work on food-borne illness as well as their ability to collaborate. Dr. Mayne explains: “Interagency emergency response is complex and works best when teams of employees have relevant experience working together on prior outbreaks, including Cyclospora outbreaks, which differ in many ways from bacterial outbreaks.”
• Budgetary cuts at FDA and CDC undermining testing, tracing, communication, and interstate cooperation: Because FDA and CDC provide both resources and technical assistance for state food safety activities, budget cuts at the federal level can have crippling effects on states, leaving fewer people to do the work with less help and fewer tools.   
• Removing Cyclospora from FoodNet, the national surveillance program: The national foodborne illness surveillance program, FoodNet, previously tracked eight pathogens, but six were eliminated from federal surveillance in July 2025, including Cyclospora.
• Stalling efforts to improve food traceability: Knowing which foods come from which sources is a key part of a food-borne illness response. In 2022, Congress passed a law requiring enhanced record-keeping for high-risk foods, such as lettuce, so specific products could be traced from farms and manufacturers through the supply chain. The Food Traceability Rule was supposed to go into effect in January 2026, but after industry lobbying, implementation was postponed to 2028. 
• Closing a USDA agricultural research facility in 2026, including its laboratories working on Cyclospora.
• Disbanding the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria in Food in 2025, which provided food safety advice to FDA and USDA, including on Cyclospora.

Dr. Bob Morris, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington School of Public Health, emphasizes that these changes are more than benign neglect; they included “four affirmative acts, in one year, at four different points in the chain that finds contaminated food. Detection, tracing, laboratory confirmation, and measurement. All were intentional and only one of the four could be justified by savings.” Dr. Morris highlights four actions by the Trump administration:

• “Delaying the traceability rule required a decision to postpone a regulation already written, already final, already scheduled, and to postpone it by thirty months.
• “Clawing back $8.9 billion from state laboratories required terminating grants that had already been awarded.
• “The gutting of the parasitology lab was collateral damage from DOGE taking a chainsaw to USAID without pausing to fully consider its impact.
• “Making FoodNet optional for the majority of foodborne diseases required somebody at CDC to change a sentence on a webpage and tell no one.”

“It is difficult to quantify precisely, but it is clear that the cuts to federal funding over the past year or so have reduced our capacity to respond to outbreaks like this,” said Craig Hedberg, Ph.D., co-director of the Minnesota Integrated Food Safety Center of Excellence. 
 

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Kennedy  promised to restore trust in the country’s food system and agencies that oversee it. Instead, in the last year, we have seen outbreaks of Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli, and Cyclospora. Kennedy’s actions undermine both public health and public trust. 

“This is a very large outbreak because we didn’t stop it in time,” said Kellogg J. Schwab, PhD, of Johns Hopkins University. “Cyclospora is a hardy and tough-to-track parasite. With a food-safety system stripped of the staff, funding, and reporting requirements needed to catch contamination before it spreads nationwide, an outbreak like this was inevitable. We knew this was going to happen.”  
 

Contributions by: Miriam Rabkin, M.D., M.P.H, Bruce Mirken, Benedicte Callan, Ph.D.,