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.

Are we really to believe that Trump cut numerous programs for disease prevention, tracking, and containment, including some that specifically tracked cyclospora, as well as damaging state capacity across the board, and gravely damaging the morale of the federal workers who haven’t yet been fired, and then the worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history happens immediately afterward purely by coincidence? Come on.

Some state health departments are doing what they can. Michigan, notably, has counted 3,762 cases at time of writing, as compared to the CDC’s 1,645, and identified salad greens as a possible—not confirmed!—culprit. But as Katrine Wallace points out at Stat News, most state health departments are not really equipped to collect and compare case information across multiple states. Coordinating national responses to national problems is the most basic responsibility of the federal government, and under Trump it just is not happening. We might not figure out what is going on until cases are seen in Minnesota, whose health department has the best disease investigators in the country. That’s likely the only state that can do the CDC’s job for it and track down disease outbreaks outside its borders.

The MAHA Trots aren’t the only problem caused by Trump’s savaging of the American administrative state. There is a festering screwworm outbreak caused in part by Elon Musk’s destruction of USAID. There is a festering measles outbreak that is both not being contained by RFK’s gutted CDC, and caused in part by him personally, through his yearslong history of spewing anti-vaccine misinformation. Weather forecasts have become notably less accurate due to Trump’s budget cuts grounding half the government’s weather balloons.

The scary thought is that with this administration’s incompetence and attitude, something much worse may be still out there.

On a final note I offer Trump Trots as the name for cyclosporiasis.