See reporting from CNN, The Guardian and American Prospect below; reaction from Brad Woodhouse, President of Protect Our Care: “Donald Trump decided tax breaks for billionaires were more important than resources for infectious disease monitoring and preparedness. Now another federal response to a health emergency has been slow and inept, just like the administration’s bumbling on the measles crisis. Weeks into this cyclospora outbreak, the source remains a mystery. Trump has the anti-Midas touch on public health, where virtually every program he cuts turns into a shitstorm. Having learned nothing from Americans getting sicker, Trump is demanding even deeper cuts to health programs that protect against preventable disease – just to keep his tax breaks safe and sound for big corporations and guys like Elon Musk.”
“If we ignore the other states and just look at the Michigan numbers, already this is probably the biggest outbreak of cyclosporiasis in US history,” said Natasha Bagdasarian, Michigan’s chief medical executive.
The outbreak comes after the Trump administration cut $12bn in public health funding in March 2025, including laboratory capacity, disease monitoring and outbreak investigation. Half of US states joined a lawsuit to claw the funding back, but the states not included in the lawsuit did not receive the funds – and the funds were delayed in being disbursed, leading to layoffs, furloughs and uncertainty.
Michigan, for example, lost an entire regional laboratory and 23 employees working in the state bureau of infectious diseases, while local health departments in the state lost 123 staff due to cuts in federal funding. […] The CDC has lost about one-third of its staff, and the majority of permanent leadership positions are empty. […] The losses and uncertainties amid mounting health threats appear to have affected the federal response to cyclospora.
“Communication has been somewhat less than we have experienced in previous outbreaks,” Bagdasarian said. “In previous outbreaks, we have received additional assistance from CDC, and we have not in this particular outbreak.”
Public communications from health agencies have also lagged. The CDC issued a health advisory notice to providers on Tuesday, two weeks after the first signals began emerging. Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), made his first public comments about cyclospora on Friday.
The government’s reaction to the cyclospora outbreak has been undermined by massive budget and staffing cuts under President Donald Trump, CNN has found […] While Trump justified cuts to USAID by portraying it as a wasteful agency helping foreign nations, millions of dollars that it spent on global malaria prevention also indirectly benefited cyclospora work in the United States, former CDC officials said.
[…] The domino effect of that lost funding is still being felt in the lagging cyclospora response today. Public health experts told CNN that warnings to doctors and efforts to home in on a specific source, among other actions, have taken much longer than they should have. Several state health departments also said federal budget cuts and the threat of even more have made it harder for them to do their jobs. […]
HHS did not comment on whether the loss of funding and personnel has slowed its response.
“[It] causes a lot of challenges to do an investigation when you’ve lost your people, you’ve lost a lot of your funding, you’re operating in uncertainty,” said a source familiar with the CDC’s outbreak investigation who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of their information. “It’s the perfect storm.” […]
The division charged with keeping a handle on parasitic diseases had already been small, with only a few employees designated to parasite work. Now, many of them are gone.
“The people who’ve led this work last year and maybe the 10 or 20 years before that no longer work at the agency,” the source said. “A lot of that knowledge is lost, and some people are doing this for the very first time in their careers.”
As a result, the CDC’s accounting of the scope of the crisis has lagged behind the numbers reported by states. Michigan alone has reported more than 5,000 cases, while the CDC has verified only 1,645 domestic cases. It’s the kind of reporting delay the CDC hasn’t seen in 15 years, the source said.
Achyut KC, a medical epidemiologist who left the CDC in 2022, said that when he was at the agency, it would mobilize quickly to address problems. The agency’s response to this crisis, he said, seems to be lacking that sort of response. […] Although the first illnesses began in mid-May, the CDC didn’t notify the public or healthcare providers about the outbreak until July 14. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services warned the public of the outbreak two weeks earlier.
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American Prospect: How Donald Trump Created the Worst Diarrhea Outbreak This Century:
On the food side of the equation, Trump has wreaked havoc on American food safety infrastructure. As part of his initial wholesale attack on state capacity in February 2025, he dissolved the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which was set up under President Reagan in 1988 to provide scientific advice and coordinate best practices for defending against dangerous microbes at all levels of government. Wouldn’t you know it, just before being destroyed the committee was working on advice regarding foodborne illness outbreaks.
By February 2026, USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service had lost 913 staff, while the Food and Nutrition Service lost 564. The agency’s National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection was also axed. All told, more than 20,000 workers left USDA last year.
The damage to American public-health infrastructure has been just as bad. The Centers for Disease Control, whose primary task is understanding and combating disease outbreaks like this one, has lost nearly 3,000 staff under Trump, while the Food and Drug Administration has lost more than 4,000. Food safety inspections have been going undone as a result. In February 2025, FDA Deputy Commissioner Jim Jones angrily resigned from the agency’s Human Foods Program, which monitors food safety, after dozens of his workers were sacked. And in July that year, Kennedy directed the CDC to cut six out of eight pathogens, cyclospora among them, monitored as part of its FoodNet program.
In addition to Trump’s deranged crusade against public health, he has also loudly signaled that big corporations can commit whatever crimes they want. Foxes are in every regulatory henhouse—that is, the ones that haven’t been de facto shuttered, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
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