Seven members of Congress have written seven letters about this outbreak in the last fourteen days. Not one of them has been publicly answered. The most recent went out Monday morning, and it is the first one addressed to a company rather than to the government: Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, wrote to Bruce Taylor, the chief executive of Taylor Fresh Foods. Michigan reported 9,253 cases the same morning. Here is the whole file, in order, and what each letter is asking for.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota went first on July 14, writing to both acting agency heads. Her ask is a restoration list: FoodNet, the Food Emergency Response Network, the Food Safety Inspection Service, the Public Health Infrastructure Grants and the Preventive Services Block Grant. “As a currently uncontrolled large foodborne outbreak across the country continues, cuts to these programs are impacting our nation’s ability to prevent, detect, and contain foodborne illnesses,” she wrote. The line in her letter that has aged best is the one about what was lost structurally rather than financially: there is no longer a central location for reporting and comparing data across state lines.
Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona wrote to Secretary Kennedy on July 15 and asked the six questions an investigator would ask. Who directed the decision to cut FoodNet’s required surveillance from eight pathogens to two, and what scientific or budget analysis supported it. What funding has been reduced or redirected since January 2025. How many people working on foodborne and parasitic disease surveillance have been terminated, reassigned, or left vacant. Which system now performs the active laboratory outreach FoodNet used to do. How many personnel are on the federal Cyclosporaresponse right now. And what evidence supports the department’s claim that none of this affected the investigation. He wants answers by August 3. He is a Representative, not a senator, which some of the coverage has gotten wrong.
Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia wrote on July 16 and did not bury the thesis. “Your foolish and self-indulgent demolition of critical public health programs puts Americans at risk,” he told the Secretary. He asked three questions — has FoodNet been restored to require tracking of Cyclospora cayetanensis, why was it terminated, and where do the investigations stand — and gave HHS seventy-two hours. That window closed on July 19. HHS told reporters his criticism was inaccurate and that CDC never stopped monitoring cyclosporiasis.
Four members of the Michigan delegation — Debbie Dingell, Kristen McDonald Rivet, Hillary Scholten and Rashida Tlaib — wrote to both acting agency heads on July 17 under the headline “Cut the Crap.” Theirs is the longest and, for my money, the best of the seven, because it is the only one written from inside the outbreak. It asks what CDC’s actual assessment of the scope is by state and what is limiting the count. It asks whether CDC and FDA have met with the Michigan health department at all. It asks whether the federal agencies agree with Michigan’s own investigators that lettuce or salad greens are the source — a question they had to ask because on July 17 the federal government had not yet said so. It asks what barriers are preventing the agencies from acting on leads Michigan investigators had already developed, how many federal personnel are on this outbreak compared with comparable outbreaks over the past five years, and whether there is any plan to restore mandatory FoodNet participation. They asked for a response by July 24. Their letter cites Michigan at more than 3,700 cases. The state is at 9,253 today. Michigan’s two senators, Gary Peters and Elissa Slotkin, did not sign it, and I could not find a separate letter from either one.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey announced three things at a hospital in Teaneck on July 20: a letter to CDC demanding FoodNet be restored to mandatory active surveillance, a bipartisan bill with Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska — the Foodborne Illness Rapid Response Act, which would bar staff cuts and hiring freezes at CDC’s foodborne-illness divisions for a full year after an outbreak is detected — and his support for the Federal and State Food Safety Information Sharing Act, which would let FDA hand unredacted inspection findings to the state and local inspectors who do roughly sixty percent of the food-processing inspections in this country. That last bill is the one nobody is covering and the one that would change the most. Neither has a bill number yet. His release that day put the outbreak at about seven thousand cases across thirty-four states; Michigan alone passed that figure inside of a week. One caution on his remarks: he told the room that because FDA’s positive sample turned out to be a false positive, “we don’t even know where it’s coming from.” FDA has said the opposite, in capital letters, on its own page — the retracted sample does not change the basis of the investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data behind the recall.
Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Cory Booker of New Jersey wrote to CDC the same week, asking for a briefing on how the outbreak was tracked and whether federal staffing cuts caused the delay. Blumenthal put it to Connecticut reporters as a demand to know about “the apparent incompetence in tracking and tracing.” They asked for answers by the end of the following week.
Which brings the file back to Monday, and to Rep. Garcia. What he wants by August 10 is five categories of documents and five written answers: every communication with FDA, CDC and USDA about cyclospora since May 1; every communication with the White House since January 21, 2025; all internal cyclospora communications; everything on the July 17 recall; and every inspection, audit or contamination record for the Taylor Farms de Mexico facilities going back to January 1, 2013 — 2013 being the year the same Guanajuato operation was tied to a Cyclospora outbreak that sickened more than six hundred people in twenty-five states. The written questions are the plainest anybody has put to this company in three weeks, starting with the full list of retailers and restaurants that received recalled produce.
The paragraph in his letter that will travel farthest is about timing. Taylor Farms gave $1 million to MAGA Inc. in March 2025, and Garcia writes that the donation landed less than one week after the administration agreed to delay FSMA 204, the lot-level Traceability Rule that would make it possible to trace a bag of shredded lettuce back to the field in twenty-four hours instead of three weeks. FDA announced that thirty-month delay on March 20, 2025, and Congress made it binding that November. Two figures in the letter need checking before anyone repeats them — it says Taylor Farms spent over $810 million on lobbying, which is off by orders of magnitude against the Wired reporting it cites, and the footnote behind the $1 million contribution is dated March 2024 while the text says March 2025. A Taylor Farms spokesman told CBS News the safety of its food is paramount and pointed again to the absence of any confirmed positive product test. White House spokesman Kush Desai called the notion that this administration would compromise on public health “absolutely false,” and defended FDA, saying the agency has never walked back the epidemiological evidence pointing at the Taylor Farms de Mexico shipment. People ate the evidence, which is the answer to the no-positive-sample point: shredded iceberg has about a two-week shelf life, and the first illnesses began in mid-May.
There is one more piece of congressional pressure that is not a letter. On July 15 the Senate health committee held the confirmation hearing for Dr. Erica Schwartz, the nominee to run CDC. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington asked her whether there was any “scientific or medical justification” for eliminating mandatory reporting of the parasite and asked her to commit to reinstating it. Schwartz would not commit; she offered instead to work with Murray’s staff and CDC scientists to understand what happened and what could be done. Chairman Bill Cassidy of Louisiana named the outbreak in his opening statement as one of the things the nominee would have to rebuild public trust on. Schwartz is still awaiting a vote. CDC has had no confirmed director since Susan Monarez was fired after twenty-nine days last August.
Against seven letters and a confirmation hearing, here is everything the top of this administration has said. On July 16, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration “has a handle” on it and that CDC and FDA have the resources they need. On July 21, at a health care fraud briefing, Secretary Kennedy said “We do have the outbreak under control”and, of the surveillance criticism, that “those criticisms are invalid.” On July 24, asked at a press conference when it would be safe to eat lettuce again, President Trump said, “I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it,” said it was the first time he had been asked, and then proposed a tariff on Mexico over the lettuce. On July 27, the White House called the collusion claim absolutely false. That is the complete list.
The career staff have been more useful than the principals. Acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas stressed on July 20 that the investigation continues, including into other potential sources and commodities. Kari Irvin, deputy director of FDA’s outbreak response network, told NBC News on July 24 that FDA has multiple Cyclospora investigations open. Gwen Biggerstaff, a deputy director at CDC, has been the only person at that agency speaking publicly through the entire outbreak. I searched for a public statement on this outbreak from Jay Bhattacharya, who has been performing the duties of CDC director since February while also running NIH, and could not find one.
Three things about this record are worth saying plainly. The first is that all seven letters were written by Democrats. The only Republican names anywhere in this file are Don Bacon, who cosponsored Gottheimer’s bill, and Bill Cassidy, who mentioned the outbreak in a hearing he was chairing. Nobody in the majority has sent a letter.
Foodborne illness has historically been the least partisan subject in Washington — the Food Safety Modernization Act passed a Democratic House and was signed by a Democratic president after being written with Republican senators, and the program whose destruction everybody is now writing about, the USDA Microbiological Data Program, was killed under President Obama.
The second is that six of the seven letters are aimed at FoodNet, and FoodNet is not the instrument that finds outbreaks. It is a ten-state active surveillance network built to measure trends. NNDSS and PulseNet are the detection systems. My friend Barbara Kowalcyk has made this point publicly and she is right: the FoodNet cut did not cause this outbreak. What it cost is the trend data you would need to say how bad this year is compared with last year, which is exactly the argument everybody is now having without the data to settle it. The FoodNet cut belongs on the list. It is not the list. Garcia’s letter is the first of the seven to name the traceability rule, which is the thing that would actually have shortened this month.
The third is that not one of these letters has been publicly answered. Ossoff’s seventy-two hours expired on July 19. The Michigan delegation’s deadline expired on July 24. Stanton’s expires next Monday and Garcia’s two weeks after that. The administration has responded to the letters the way it has responded to the outbreak, which is through spokespeople, in the past tense, and to reporters rather than to Congress.
None of this is new. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on Cyclospora and imported raspberries in July 1998 and called a CDC epidemiologist and a patient to testify about it. Rosa DeLauro wrote to FDA and CDC in August 2013, during the outbreak that traced to this same Mexican facility, asking whether the agencies considered it acceptable to identify the source of an outbreak and withhold that information from the public. She wrote again in August 2018, about the Fresh Express outbreak, complaining that the timeline did not instill confidence that FDA had acted in consumers’ interest. Thirteen years and eight years later, the questions in the mail this month are the same questions.
There is a version of this where the letters are theater, and I have watched enough of them to know it happens. This is not that. Stanton is asking who signed the decision. The Michigan delegation is asking why the federal government would not act on leads its own state investigators had already developed. Garcia is asking for the emails. Those are answerable questions with documents behind them, and the reason to answer them is not that a member of Congress asked. It is that 9,253 people in one state are sick, the count is still climbing past 16,000, and the government cannot yet tell anybody how the parasite got into the lettuce.
