In July 2025, the CDC scaled back FoodNet, the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network it runs in partnership with states to track food poisoning. The program's required monitoring was cut from eight pathogens to two: it now regularly tracks only salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. Dropped from routine surveillance were cyclospora, campylobacter, listeria, shigella, vibrio, and Yersinia.
A year later, cyclospora is the one spreading. By mid-July 2026, an unusually large cyclosporiasis outbreak had taken hold, with Michigan alone reporting hundreds of cases (some accounts put the state's total in the thousands) and infections recorded across at least 17 states. Cyclosporiasis causes watery, sometimes explosive diarrhea. Reporting by Newsweek, Forbes, and U.S. News noted that the surveillance cuts, made under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s department, left the outbreak spreading faster than the CDC could track it.
The sequence is the recurring hazard of the administration's public-health cuts: a monitoring system trimmed for savings goes dark on a pathogen, and the gap is discovered only when that pathogen surges. Surveillance is cheapest to cut and most expensive to be without precisely when an outbreak begins (see 46% of CDC Public Health Databases Stopped Updating or Were Taken Offline, Including Measles and HIV Tracking and Kennedy Replaced All 17 CDC Vaccine Advisers, and the Panel He Appointed Rewrote the Childhood Schedule).