The next major foodborne illness outbreak in the United States could be far more severe.
That warning is coming from food safety experts around the country, who say federal funding cuts have weakened the nation’s ability to spot outbreaks early and contain them before they spread. Their concerns have intensified amid recent outbreaks of cyclospora, a parasite that has sickened thousands of people across dozens of states. What worries them most is the possibility that the next threat could involve a far deadlier pathogen.
America’s food safety system relies on a patchwork of state and federal agencies responsible for identifying, investigating and stopping foodborne disease outbreaks. One of its central tools is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FoodNet program, formally known as the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network. The program was launched after four children died from E. coli linked to hamburgers in the early 1990s. Participating states work directly with laboratories to collect case data, giving public health officials an early warning when a contaminated food source may be making people sick.
During President Donald Trump’s second term, however, the administration has cut billions of dollars from public health programs and dismissed thousands of employees at federal health agencies. It has also scaled back FoodNet, ending the program’s required surveillance of cyclospora and five other pathogens that, collectively, are responsible for hundreds of deaths in the U.S. each year.
“You’re basically allowing for outbreaks to continue without being figured out. Invariably more people will get sick,” said Bill Marler, a Seattle-area food safety attorney and advocate who has sued Taco Bell on behalf of customers who say they became ill with cyclospora after eating at the chain.
Under the revised FoodNet surveillance rules, the 10 participating states — selected to reflect a broad cross section of the U.S. population — are no longer required to report cases of listeria. That change is raising particular concern because the bacterium kills as many as 30% of people diagnosed with an infection.
Listeria infections can lead to serious and sometimes devastating complications, including seizures, miscarriage and sepsis that can damage organs. Although listeria is far less common than the type of E. coli that FoodNet must still track, almost 95% of infected patients are hospitalized. CDC and Food and Drug Administration figures estimate that listeria causes 170 to 260 deaths each year, in the United States.
“It’s very hard to identify listeria outbreaks,” said Neal Fortin, director of the Institute of Food Laws and Regulations at Michigan State University. The decision to remove listeria from FoodNet’s mandatory surveillance, he said, “really does disturb me.”
Thirty-three people died and a pregnant woman had a miscarriage in 2011 after consuming cantaloupe contaminated with listeria. The FDA identified the cause in less than two weeks.
States participating in FoodNet also no longer have to report illnesses caused by campylobacter, a bacteria often contracted from raw and undercooked poultry that afflicts an estimated 1.5 million people each year. The bacteria sickened about 60 people in Idaho this year in an outbreak linked to raw milk — a product Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has championed, even though pasteurization kills harmful bacteria.
HHS denies that the changes to FoodNet or Trump administration staffing cuts have elevated the risk that future outbreaks will be harder to identify and stop.
“FDA investigators were not affected by staffing changes or force reductions, and the FY 2027 President’s Budget proposes a $33 million increase for food safety activities,” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said in an email. And the CDC never stopped monitoring illnesses caused by cyclospora, she said.
The CDC has other, passive surveillance systems, but they rely on states to report problems.
“There’s no requirement of how long it takes them to do that,” said Barbara Kowalcyk, the director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University.
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And the FDA meets only a fraction of the number of inspections mandated by Congress. The FDA hasn’t met its mandated targets for domestic and foreign inspections since 2018, according to a report early last year by the Government Accountability Office.
Food safety inspections of manufacturers by the FDA plummeted from 10,641 facilities in 2011 to about 4,500 a decade later. The agency had 432 investigators for domestic and foreign inspections in 2024, according to a GAO report.
That was before the Trump administration cut 3,500 jobs at the FDA in a push to reduce federal spending.
Now, food safety leaders say the situation could get worse, because the Trump administration wants to push more routine food inspections to the states and further reduce the number of federal staffers that handle investigations and inspections.
State health departments are already overburdened from federal funding cuts and staffing shortages, forcing some to reduce or halt prevention programs so they can focus on more emergent concerns.
The cuts are being felt in Michigan, which has reported more than 7,000 cases of cyclosporiasis, the most of any state. The cyclospora parasite can cause frequent diarrhea that can last for days or even weeks, as well as abdominal pain, nausea, and fatigue.
The health department in Washtenaw County, Michigan, already pulled some staff off other work, such as immunizations and sexual health, to handle a recent measles outbreak that sickened seven people, including five kids. Now those same nurses are spending hours on the phone with hundreds of people with cyclosporiasis, trying to trace the source of their illness through weeks-old takeout receipts, bank statements, and recollections.
“We are starting to see the consequences of an underfunded public health system in 2026,” said Natasha Bagdasarian, Michigan’s chief medical executive. “Currently it’s cyclospora. Eventually, we are going to lose the ability to detect something else.”
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