Department of Listeria and Preventable Childhood Illness

How the Trump Administration’s cuts to federal capacity have made our food supply less safe and promoted dangerous anti-vaccine ideology

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In Monday’s edition of Watchdog Weekly, Aya exposed Russell Vought’s vampiric assault on the public’s lifeblood by preventing Americans from accessing affordable groceries, child care services, and health insurance.

The weaponization of federal agencies, like the Office of Management and Budget, against the people they are mandated to serve is both a central flaw and feature of Trump governance. 

Vought’s attempts to shred our social safety net also comes at a moment when Americans are increasingly at risk of infection from foodborne illnesses and vaccine-preventable diseases because of Trump’s “health” policy agenda.

Trump Doesn’t Care if Your Food Kills You

That assault has found particularly fertile ground in the agencies responsible for keeping America’s food supply safe. Since Trump took office, the USDA has suffered a massive purge of institutional knowledge, inspection capacity, and scientific expertise. Data from the Office of Personnel Management shows that over 27,000 employees left last year, with nearly 15,000 of them leaving due to Russell Vought and Elon Musk’s deferred resignation program.

Among those lost were approximately 1,200, or 17%, of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service staff. These were specialists responsible for making sure that foodborne illness stays relatively uncommon. For example, Reuters reported that one such scientist was a highly specialized expert in the detection of fungal toxins in grain elevators. Contaminated grains that now may go undetected could lead to new outbreaks amongst people or animals. This sort of unglamorous work is a critical role played by our government, detecting disease outbreaks in our food supply before they start—until DOGE forced them out.

Capacity for inspecting seafood has plummeted too, with mass firings at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As early as April 2025, experts were warning that cuts to NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service—including a budget cut of 28% and an estimated 19% of staff—had already imperiled U.S. fisheries. Though OPM doesn’t specify the status of National Marine Fisheries Service staff in its Federal Workforce Data, reporting from last summer indicates that 30% of staff were slated to be slashed. 

Cuts to inspection capacity on seafood safety have plummeted in other ways as well. One November investigation from ProPublica found that inspections of foreign food facilities, which account for most of the country’s seafood consumption and over half of its fresh fruit consumption, plummeted to historic lows in 2025. This is especially concerning as research has shown that the proportional increase in imported food has been associated with an increase in foodborne illness. According to the ProPublica report, two dozen current and former FDA officials attributed the severe reduction in inspections directly to the Trump administration’s personnel policy. 

The consequences of gutting the nation’s food inspection capacity are already materializing. Between June 2025 and February 2026, a listeria outbreak linked to prepared pasta meals sickened at least 28 people across 19 states, killing 7 and causing one fetal loss. Since September 2025, an ongoing salmonella outbreak tied to moringa leaf powder has infected 119 people across 36 states, resulting in 32 hospitalizations. A recalled baby formula made by the company ByHeart has been linked to 45 cases of infant botulism since March 2025.

No Vaccine Against Stupidity

Trump’s health officials have been equally brazen in their efforts to dismantle the nation’s vaccine safety infrastructure so far this year. 

In late August, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired CDC director Susan Monarez less than one month after she was sworn in. Monarez claims she was “holding the line on science” after she was pressured to preapprove vaccine recommendations from RFK Jr.’s new vaccine advisory committee without proper scientific review. Monarez’s firing created an “exodus” of resignations among top CDC staff, further gutting agency-wide expertise in zoonotic diseases, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and more. 

Shortly after, Jim O’Neill took over as acting director of the CDC. O’Neill, an investment fund manager by trade, has a history of dangerous and deregulatory views on drug and vaccine policy. In one 2014 talk, O’Neill argued that drug makers shouldn’t be required to prove the safety of their products before being made available to the public, saying: “Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.”

On January 5, O’Neill issued a memo overhauling the U.S. childhood immunization schedule without the required input of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The new memo accepted new and highly controversial recommendations that reduce both the number of diseases covered and the frequency of doses called for. A letter widely-signed by vaccination experts accused O’Neill of “Adopting an immunization schedule designed for another country–without accounting for the distinct epidemiology and risk profile of the United States.” 

O’Neill, who is also a Peter Thiel co-conspirator on “anti-aging” and a believer in using life extension technologies to achieve “immortality,” departed the CDC on February 13, 2026. Rather than nominating a replacement for one of the most important public health positions in the country, however, the Trump Administration has allowed Jay Bhattacharya to remain as acting director since O’Neill’s departure. Bhattacharya is an economist by training who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that the COVID-19 lockdowns were a mistake. 

In March, with Bhattacharya still at the helm of the CDC, Trump officially missed the deadline to nominate a new director. As observed by The Hill: “The Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 states that, apart from vacancies caused by sickness, acting officers may not serve in the role for more than 210 days. It has now been 211 days since Monarez’s termination.”

The following month, FDA’s former director Marty Makary attempted to stall vaccine production. Citing concerns over the study’s design, the agency abruptly refused to review Moderna’s license application for an investigational mRNA influenza vaccine. Thankfully, public backlash to the decision forced its reversal. 

By mid-March, a crucial court ruling temporarily stemmed the bleeding. A federal court in Boston ruled that RFK Jr’s unilateral overhaul of national vaccine policy was unlawful. U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy’s March 16 ruling also froze additional partisan appointments to the committee and cancelled ACIP’s future meetings.

But the Trump administration has refused to let the rule of law stand in the way of its agenda. HHS attempted to bypass the courts immediately by quietly renewing ACIP’s charter on April 9—the day it was set to expire. The renewed the charter’s mandate was rewritten to codify the RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine ideology into federal policy. 

Having already purged the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists from the committee, ACIP’s new charter expanded the number of organizations able to participate in the committee. 

Now, a cohort of vaccine-skeptical organizations, including Physicians for Informed Consent, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and the Independent Medical Alliance, have a new role in advising vaccine policy. The rewritten charter also stripped away requirements for vaccine-specific expertise among ACIP’s membership and shifted the committee’s focus toward investigating already debunked theories of immunization-based harms. 

Trump, refusing to be outdone by his cabinet members, ignored the court-ordered freeze on ACIP activity himself. On May 29, he issued an executive order to ostensibly realign U.S. vaccine recommendations with global “peer nations.” In reality, however, the order directs ACIP and the CDC to reduce the number of vaccines universally recommended by the federal government.

The below-the-radar actions of Vought, Trump, and RFK Jr. will cause tremendous suffering in the coming years. Our country’s broken government will only heal if the public correctly understands those villains as responsible for unnecessary pain and death. Representative democracy will only address this situation and prevent its recurrence if we all share cause and effect as widely as possible.

Image: President Trump signs an executive order alongside RFK Jr in the Oval Office, September 2025, official White House photo.