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As a sprawling cyclospora outbreak spreads across the United States, critics of the Trump administration’s response have placed the blame on cuts to a single program. But public health experts say that misses the deeper problems the outbreak has exposed.
FoodNet, a federal foodborne illness monitoring tool that tracks cases across 10 states, tracked cyclospora infections until last year, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reduced the number of pathogens that FoodNet required states to report from eight to two. Cyclospora was among the pathogens that became optional.
Public health experts say following cyclospora cases with FoodNet is valuable, and they believe it should be resumed. But even if the same requirements were still in place, the outbreak could be the same as it is now because FoodNet is only one part of the surveillance network used to detect and investigate cyclospora outbreaks.
“I don’t think it has a direct effect, but it certainly seems like a poor decision considering what’s going on right now,” Donald Schaffner, chair of Rutgers University’s food science department said. “If FoodNet had not been scaled back, we might be collecting valuable information right now that will help in the future.”
Rather than exposing the consequences of a single program cut, health experts say the outbreak has revealed a public health system that has been under strain for years. That has left investigators to chase one of the largest cyclospora outbreaks in recent memory with outdated technology, limited staffing, and increasingly stretched resources.
Cyclospora outbreaks are often linked to fresh produce, including leafy greens. Officials in Michigan, the state with the most cases, have identified lettuce as a potential source, prompting some restaurants, including Taco Bell, to temporarily stop serving it, though investigators have not confirmed those findings.
Rodney Rohde, chair of Texas State University’s Medical Laboratory Science Program, said cyclospora investigations rely on a network of overlapping surveillance systems, including state public health laboratories, CDC case reporting, molecular epidemiology, and FDA traceback investigations.
“FoodNet remains an essential surveillance system for monitoring trends in foodborne illnesses, but cyclospora surveillance relies on multiple complementary systems,” Rohde said. “The impact of changes to FoodNet alone on this specific outbreak is likely limited.”
Gwen Biggerstaff, deputy director of the CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases, said the changes to FoodNet haven’t hampered the government’s response.
“The data that we have for cyclosporiasis for this outbreak is the same as we’ve had for all of the other seasons,” she added. “We use the same systems and the same processes. So that is unchanged.”
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The strain is most visible in Michigan, which has reported more than 3,300 cases, compared with roughly 50 cases in a typical year. Health officials say both the scale and speed are unprecedented for the summer season, when cyclospora outbreaks are most common.
“Public health now — not only in Michigan, but in other states, too — is working around the clock on evenings and weekends and pulling staff from other jobs to do this incredibly detailed, highly manual work in a system that is close to being overwhelmed,” Natasha Bagdasarian, chief medical executive of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, told Semafor in an interview.
Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., has pointed to the outbreak as evidence that recent cuts have left states more vulnerable. “Instead of investing in the proven systems that detect and stop outbreaks, Secretary Kennedy has dismantled critical public health safeguards and sidelined the scientists Michiganders count on,” she said.
She said investigators still rely on outdated databases and manual data entry as they interview patients about meals eaten weeks earlier.
But several public health experts said the weaknesses exposed by the outbreak did not begin with the current administration, even as they argue recent cuts have put pressure on an already fragile system.
“There was a brief time after COVID where we made some more investments, but we haven’t kept up with those,” Jerold Mande, former deputy undersecretary for food safety at the Department of Agriculture. “And then it’s just gotten so much worse with the cuts that the Trump administration has made.”
Darin Detwiler, a professor of food policy at Northeastern University, said the problems are cumulative rather than the result of any single decision.
“Public health systems rarely fail because of one missing position or one budget reduction,” he said. “They become less effective when small reductions in staffing, laboratory capacity, surveillance, data management, and institutional knowledge accumulate over time.”
Barbara Kowalcyk, director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University, said years of stagnant funding have weakened the country’s ability to respond to outbreaks. “The biggest challenge right now is the lack of funding at the federal level,” she said.
Room for Disagreement
Still, Stevens and other Democratic lawmakers have blamed the Trump administration’s cuts to federal health programs and workforce reduction, arguing that they weakened the country’s ability to detect and respond to outbreaks.
“We know it as a fact that health employees were DOGE’d and were cut,” Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., told reporters Tuesday. “Fewer resources, fewer people, protecting our communities across the HHS spectrum is a reality.”
The View From The Trump Administration
The Food and Drug Administration disputed suggestions that recent staffing changes have affected the current investigation, with an agency spokesperson saying it has the “expertise, personnel, and resources necessary to detect, investigate, and respond to foodborne illness outbreaks.”
The agency added that FDA investigators involved in outbreak response were not affected by recent reductions in force.