Last week as people wrestled with the idea that eating a fast food taco might drastically sicken them for weeks, they looked for their government for an answer to the very basic questions – what is causing this and how will we stop it? In recent times the US government has been pretty responsive in identifying and then stopping such food born outbreaks.

Through response mechanisms built up in various governmental agencies such as the FDA, the CDC, the Agriculture department and other related agencies constantly gathering and evaluating data were often able to staunch food born outbreaks early and identify the causes and deal with them quickly. While it is not possible to totally prevent such outbreaks, they were very good at limiting damage.

When a contaminated food source was identified it was usually disposed of quickly and fully eliminating the hazard. Companies knew that responding quickly and eliminating any problem was the best for their reputations. When there is a problem the public wants to know that XYZ company will respond with public health in mind.

That is why the response in the recent cyclosporia outbreak was so concerning as the investigation and response broke all the norms. Much as the response to the Covid outbreak of 2020 was fumbled into a massive outbreak with hundreds of thousands dying, the current cyclosporia situation has the makings of being massively fumbled far beyond what it should be.

One of the reasons that Covid was fumbled so badly was that the Trump administration put political considerations above the general welfare. Remember that decisions were made to let Democratic areas such as cities suffer to decrease democratic voter rolls.

This time around, preventative and early warning aparatus were dismantled to free up money to give huge tax breaks to the wealthy. Often some of these tax breaks would return to the MAGA party in the form of “donations.” Thus when the aparatus was needed, it was unavailable.

Also the identifying and tracing operation was far below what it had been, thus delaying the response. And just to add an exclamation point to this whole mess, (for the first time I had ever heard of) declared their testing to have yielded a “false positive.”

Mixed in with all this is what appears to be some “quid pro quo” (this for that) donations from Taylor Farms. Thom Hartmann spells it out in more detail in his Thom Hartmann Report daily substack newsletter:

As I write this, federal investigators are chasing the worst cyclospora outbreak in decades, thousands of people across more than thirty states doubled over with what the CDC delicately calls “frequent and sometimes explosive diarrhea,” and they still can’t tell you for certain which farm it came from.

Over the weekend, after the $7 billion company’s CEO visited the White House, the FDA walked back a positive test on lettuce from Taylor Farms, the largest salad producer in North America, announcing that its own earlier finding of cyclospora had somehow turned out to be a false positive. That leaves thousands of sickened Americans with no confirmed source at all, which is a peculiar place to land in a country that once prided itself on knowing where its dinner came from.

The reason nobody can trace it back isn’t much of a mystery. Back in March of 2025 Trump’s FDA and it’s boss, Bob Kennedy, delayed its new Food Traceability Rule by thirty months, shoving the deadline to track high-risk foods like leafy greens from the field to your plate all the way out to 2028.

Six days after that delay went public, Taylor Fresh Foods, the parent company of Taylor Farms, cut a million dollar check to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, part of the $2.2 million it has steered to Republican committees this cycle.

Around that same stretch the CDC quietly cut its own foodborne illness surveillance from eight pathogens down to two, and cyclospora was one of the six it stopped watching. The monitoring had always been a hassle for the giant salad makers. And then the big money hit Trump’s bank account, and you’re the one stuck in the bathroom wondering who’s payoff got you.

That’s the whole corrupt Republican machine in a single lettuce field, and what follows is the same story told a couple dozen more times.

So once again we have a Trump regime governing only for their donors and to hell with the rest.

You can almost bet that this time next year we will probably be going through some form of a health crisis that could have been stopped before it became a crisis. I hear that tuberculosis has been identified at an ICE prison in Colorado.

Corruption does have consequences for everyone. Remember that when you vote this fall.