Trump's CDC fund cuts responsible for cyclosporiasis outbreak? Here's how

A parasite is tearing through the country's produce aisles and nearly 7,000 Americans are paying for it with weeks of brutal, watery diarrhea.

The illness known as cyclosporiasis is caused by a nasty little parasite called cyclospora that enters human body through contaminated fruits and vegetables. The disease has now spread to more than 30 states with Michigan alone having logged over 3,300 cases.

Health officials have described the outbreak as one of the biggest foodborne outbreaks the US has seen in years.

Now many are blaming President Trump’s fund cuts for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after it was revealed that the center quietly shut the program built to catch and control the outbreak early.

FoodNet, a food safety surveillance system that had tracked eight major foodborne pathogens since the 1990s, was scaled back by the agency in July 2025 after the White House budget plan proposed a 53% funding reduction.

A former USDA official, Eric Deeble, said he'd bet cyclospora was swept up in that scope reduction without much thought. 

In an interview with CBS News, a physician said the country's surveillance systems have been hammered by federal cuts and that a lot of the CDC staff who got laid off were the exact people who used to hunt down outbreaks like this one.

A public health professor in Florida said she saw this coming the moment she watched FoodNet get gutted. Her prediction wasn't a maybe. It was a when.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services defended the cuts as trimming a bloated bureaucracy left behind by the previous administration.