On July 1, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cut its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network from eight pathogens down to two. FoodNet kept Salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. It dropped Campylobacter, Listeria, Shigella, Vibrio, Yersinia — and Cyclospora. The reason given was money.
Twelve months and eighteen days later, the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history began showing up in Michigan emergency rooms. Nobody could count it. CDC has confirmed 1,644 cases tied to Taco Bell in five states. Michigan alone reports more than 5,000. Nationally we are somewhere past 9,000 confirmed or probable in 2026 against 2,700 for all of 2025, and the honest answer is that nobody knows, because on July 1 of last year we stopped looking.
I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this story is wrong. This is not a Republican story. It is not a Democratic story. It is a story about an industry that spent fourteen years dismantling the tools that would have protected it, under presidents of both parties, and is now standing in the wreckage wondering why nobody can tell whose lettuce quickly made people sick.
Start in 2012. The U.S. Department of Agriculture ran a program called the Microbiological Data Program. It cost about $5 million a year. State laboratories sampled high-risk produce already moving through commerce — lettuce, spinach, cantaloupe, sprouts, tomatoes — and when a lab found a pathogen it told FDA, CDC and state health officials immediately. From 2002 to 2011 it ran 120,887 samples in 42 states. In 2010 and 2011 alone it triggered 23 produce recalls, 15 of them involving people who were already sick. It was a trip wire.
President Obama zeroed it out in the fiscal year 2013 budget. Rosa DeLauro grilled Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack about it in February 2012 and got an answer about the program not fitting the mission of the Agricultural Marketing Service. And my friend Dan Flynn wrote a column about it at Food Safety News under a one-word headline: Blood. His first line was that “Big Fresh has the blood on its hands.” Big Fresh was the United Fresh Produce Association, and Dan gave its paid lobbyists the credit for the kill. Fourteen years later, United Fresh no longer exists as such — it merged into the International Fresh Produce Association in 2022. The lobbying does not disappear when the letterhead changes.
Read what Dan wrote in 2012 and then read the news this month. He said killing the MDP would leave FDA, CDC and state health departments in the dark about the incidence of pathogens in fresh produce. That is not analysis anymore. That is a description of July 2026.
In December 2024, under the Biden administration, FDA moved to cut funding for state and local food safety programs — the programs that perform half of all food processing facility inspections, ninety percent of produce safety inspections and every single retail inspection in this country. Four Democratic senators, Dick Durbin, Richard Blumenthal, Tina Smith and Cory Booker, wrote to object. They warned the cuts would undo years of progress toward an integrated food safety system. They were ignored.
Then in February and April of 2025 the DOGE/Trump layoffs came, and food safety staff at FDA and CDC were among the losses. In March 2025 FDA announced it would push the Food Traceability Rule out thirty months. On July 1 FoodNet dropped Cyclospora. In November Congress made the traceability delay binding through July 20, 2028. And STAT reported in December that state health departments, which do most of the initial work on foodborne illness, are so dependent on federal block grants that nobody can even follow the money to measure what was lost.
Three administrations. Both parties. One direction.
And the industry was not a bystander to the last piece of it. FMI called the Food Traceability Rule “overly complex” and said its requirements were so burdensome as to not be achievable with available technology. When the thirty-month delay came, FMI applauded it. The National Grocers Association applauded it. The Global Cold Chain Alliance said it was encouraged by this delay. In 2024 three members of Congress introduced a bill, backed by FMI and NGA, that would have gone further — delaying compliance again and stripping lot-code requirements from restaurants, retail stores and warehouses outright. The Safe Food Coalition fought the delay and lost. So did the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
So here is the ledger. The produce lobby killed the only program testing produce for pathogens. Surveillance for this specific parasite was switched off a year before this specific outbreak. The rule that would let anyone trace a bag of shredded lettuce to a field in twenty-four hours was pushed to 2028, with industry cheering. And every one of those was framed as relief — from burden, from cost, from complexity.
Now look at what that relief bought.
It took FDA until July 16 to name the food. Illnesses started May 13. When FDA finally published a recall notice, it contained no lot codes and identified customers as CV, JB, MARK, MKTSD, PK, SUB, SY and TF. A positive sample turned up at the border, and FDA reported that the contaminated lot was not part of the recall and might be in commerce or in people’s homes — and nobody could say where it went, because nobody is required to be able to say. Meanwhile grocery stores pulled bags, Sysco pulled product, a national chain pulled an ingredient from every restaurant it operates, and consumers across thirty-four states quietly stopped buying salad.
That is the part I do not think the industry has understood yet. Traceability is not a tax on the innocent. It is the only thing that protects them. When you can name the grower in a day, one farm takes the loss. When you cannot, the whole category takes it — every clean operation in Salinas and Yuma, every grower who did everything right, every processor with a spotless record. LGMA is fond of pointing out that California and Arizona grow about ninety percent of America’s lettuce. That is exactly the problem. When the source cannot be identified, ninety percent of the lettuce is the suspect.
You cannot lobby away the pathogen. You can only lobby away the ability to find it. And when you succeed, you do not stop being blamed — you just lose the evidence that would have cleared you.
I said in my last post that I would rather work with these organizations than shout at them, and I meant it. So let me say the constructive version. Restore national Cyclospora surveillance and put it in the water where the parasite actually lives. Restore the state and local inspection funding that two administrations cut. Rebuild something like the MDP — a five-million-dollar trip wire is the cheapest insurance policy this industry will ever be offered. And stop fighting FSMA 204. Get it in force on the original schedule and be loud about it, because the next time this happens, the rule you called unachievable is the only thing standing between one bad lot and your entire crop.
Fourteen years ago, the produce lobby decided it did not want anyone testing its lettuce. This summer it got a look at the world it asked for. You reaped what you sowed. It is time to plant something better.
