President Donald Trump’s management of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been full of controversy, from his massive layoffs to his promise to right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan to legalize certain psychedelics. Yet according to a recent report, one particular scandal — a cyclospora in lettuce outbreak that has led to at least 11,000 cases of explosive diarrhea — speaks to much deeper problems with how the agency is run.
“The FDA believes that the biggest outbreak this season, the one affecting nine states so far, came to us aboard contaminated iceberg lettuce from Mexico,” reported CBS News’ David Pogue on Sunday. “That lettuce was shipped nationwide by Taylor Farms, a huge distributor that supplies thousands of groceries and restaurants.”
Susan Mayne, an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Public Health who ran the FDA’s food-safety department from 2015 to 2023, said, “We’ve never seen anything like this. This is just an astonishingly large outbreak, record-setting outbreak.”
She added, “It could be inadequate bathroom facilities, inadequate hand-washing facilities. Somehow that water is getting contaminated from some other source – sewage, some other source.”
CBS News went on to report that Trump has cut roughly 20 percent of the staff from the FDA and roughly 25 percent of the staff from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Specifically, the CDC now has only three scientists tracking food parasites, whereas they used to have 11 scientists doing that.
“We had a national advisory committee, a committee that advised FDA and USDA on how to prevent microbial contamination in food,” Mayne said. “That advisory committee was disbanded. We used to convene meetings with our Mexican counterparts on how we can work together to improve food safety. That entire team was let go.”
CBS News further reported, “And then there’s FoodNet, a joint venture of the FDA, the CDC, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture that provided an early-warning surveillance program that used to track eight particularly nasty microbes. But now, it tracks only two – and cyclospora is not one of them.”
As a result, if cyclospora strikes America in 2027, the FDA will still be unable to trace it without intervention from either the executive branch or Congress.
“We’ve had no cuts in our surveillance program,” Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement responding to people. “We did cuts in the FoodNet program, but they were for redundant surveillance.”
Mayne countered that by telling CBS News that, “No, it’s not accurate. I mean, clearly there have been cuts.”