President Donald Trump’s handling of the Food and Drug Administration has drawn scrutiny over issues ranging from large-scale layoffs to his pledge to right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan to legalize certain psychedelics. A recent CBS News report said a major cyclospora outbreak linked to lettuce, which has caused at least 11,000 cases of explosive diarrhea, points to broader concerns about the agency’s food-safety operations.

Cyclospora is a microscopic parasite that can cause cyclosporiasis, an intestinal illness typically associated with contaminated food or water. Federal food-safety investigations often rely on coordination among the FDA, CDC, USDA and state agencies to identify contaminated products, trace supply chains and warn consumers or businesses.

“The FDA believes that the biggest outbreak this season, the one affecting nine states so far, came to us aboard contaminated iceberg lettuce from Mexico,” CBS News’ David Pogue reported Sunday. “That lettuce was shipped nationwide by Taylor Farms, a huge distributor that supplies thousands of groceries and restaurants.”

Susan Mayne, an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Public Health who led the FDA’s food-safety department from 2015 to 2023, told CBS News the scale of the outbreak was extraordinary.

“We've never seen anything like this. This is just an astonishingly large outbreak, record-setting outbreak,” Mayne said.

She said the contamination could have resulted from failures in sanitation or water safety. “It could be inadequate bathroom facilities, inadequate hand-washing facilities. Somehow that water is getting contaminated from some other source – sewage, some other source,” Mayne said.

According to CBS News, Trump has reduced FDA staffing by roughly 20 percent and cut about 25 percent of the staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report said the CDC now has three scientists tracking food parasites, compared with 11 previously assigned to that work.

Mayne also pointed to the loss of advisory and cross-border food-safety coordination mechanisms. “We had a national advisory committee, a committee that advised FDA and USDA on how to prevent microbial contamination in food,” she said. “That advisory committee was disbanded. We used to convene meetings with our Mexican counterparts on how we can work together to improve food safety. That entire team was let go.”

Those coordination channels are especially relevant for fresh produce, which often moves through complex regional and international supply chains before reaching restaurants and grocery stores. When an outbreak involves a perishable item such as lettuce, delays in traceback can make it harder for investigators to determine where contamination occurred before the product is consumed or discarded.

CBS News also reported that FoodNet, a joint program of the FDA, the CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, had previously served as an early-warning surveillance system tracking eight especially dangerous microbes. “But now, it tracks only two – and cyclospora is not one of them,” the report said.

The report said that, as a result, if cyclospora strikes the United States in 2027, the FDA would still be unable to trace it without action from either the executive branch or Congress.

Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disputed the characterization of the surveillance cuts in a statement. “We've had no cuts in our surveillance program,” Kennedy said. “We did cuts in the FoodNet program, but they were for redundant surveillance.”

Mayne rejected that explanation in comments to CBS News. “No, it's not accurate. I mean, clearly there have been cuts,” she said.