The Taylor Farms Cyclospora Outbreak Shows Why Congress Must Investigate Both Trump and His Corporate Accomplices
This article was originally published in Watchdog Weekly. Read it here.
Last week, in response to a Semafor article discussing whether Democrats should investigate Big Tech companies in the next Congress, Chamber of Progress founder and CEO Adam Kovacevich outlined his vision for congressional oversight if Democrats retake a chamber in the midterms. Claiming there was “no clear partisan atmospheric benefit” to investigating the companies collaborating with Trump, Kovacevich urged Democrats to go easy on corporate villains and focus their magnifying glasses on the Trump administration alone.
We couldn’t disagree more. First, it’s worth noting that Chamber of Progress’ backers are a who’s who of tech corporations that ingratiated themselves with the administration: Amazon, Coinbase, Google, Intuit. The list goes on. Of course Kovacevich doesn’t want Congress to conduct oversight of Big Tech—they fund his think tank!
But the general point betrays Kovacevich’s misunderstanding of the value of oversight. Effective oversight is a holistic process that seeks to identify poor administration, assess agencies’ performance, and communicate results to the public. It also must identify the social problems that a government uncaptured by corporate dominance would otherwise be addressing. There’s no way to properly undertake a mission that is adversarial by design in a half-hearted manner. That means congressional investigations must include both the Trump administration and the corporations that have leveraged their money and connections to avoid federal enforcement and oversight. In doing so, Congress can hold both the corrupt officials and the beneficiaries of corruption accountable, while simultaneously spotlighting the material impacts that this corruption has had on regular people. The recent cyclospora outbreak is a textbook example of why the next Congress should not preemptively limit their oversight targets.
Farm Action, a watchdog group covering food and agriculture issues, recently released a report highlighting Taylor Farms’s dominance of our food supply chain and its influence campaign on the Trump administration. The company’s reach is extensive: it produces 40 percent of the salad kits sold in the US and supplies both major retailers like Walmart and Trader Joe’s and distributors like Sysco and US Foods, often under different brand names. As Farm Action explains, “That concentration of power comes at a cost. The larger a company’s reach, the greater the consequences when something goes wrong. Those risks are compounded when a company’s reach is largely hidden from public view.”
These dangers of concentration have clearly played out in the recent cyclospora outbreak linked to Taylor Farms lettuce, by far the largest outbreak of the parasite in US history. According to the latest update from the CDC, the cyclospora outbreak has infected nearly 11,000 people, caused 454 hospitalizations, and killed two people while spreading across 17 states. Separately, a salmonella outbreak linked to jalapenos distributed by Coast Citrus Distributors has sickened 431 people in 32 states, leading to recalls by the implicated Coast Citrus and Taylor Farms, which has since withdrawn products made with the tainted peppers.
Still, our food safety crisis is not limited to Taylor Farms’ shortcomings. In July, Midwest Poultry Services recalled over 19 million eggs over concerns about salmonella contamination. In just the past two weeks, there have been similar recalls of granola and dog food. The FDA has 13 active investigations into outbreaks of food related illnesses, including E. coli, listeria, and several other cases of salmonella and cyclospora. So much for Making America Healthy Again.
The rise of foodborne illnesses is the entirely predictable consequence of the administration’s approach, or lack thereof, towards food safety. As we flagged in February 2025, the reported hiring freeze at the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service was an obvious recipe for disaster. That was only the start. The agency that keeps our food safe has now lost 1,100 employees since the start of Trump 2.0 according to the Office of Personnel Management. The Centers for Disease Control has lost over 3,000 workers, including a team of scientists specifically responsible for processing parasite samples during outbreaks like cyclosporiasis. The Food and Drug Administration lost nearly 4,000 employees, including dozens from the agency’s Human Foods Program that oversees food safety. To make matters worse, the administration has cut $5.8 billion in CDC grants to state governments that can help fund state-level health departments.
Foodborne illnesses will likely continue to plague Americans until the executive branch starts to take food safety seriously and restaffs the relevant agencies with experts that know how to prevent, identify, and respond to these outbreaks. The failure of the Trump administration to keep our food safe is clearly one of the many areas ripe for congressional oversight. The public deserves to know why the administration made these cuts, who needs to be held accountable, how exactly the cuts have caused the food safety system to repeatedly fail, and what resources are needed to prevent it from happening in the future.
But there’s another aspect that, if Congress follows Kovacevich’s advice, would go unaddressed: the role of corporations like Taylor Farms in pushing the administration to deregulate food safety, and the impact of corporate consolidation on the severity of outbreak, as Farm Action’s report spotlighted.
Taylor Farms’ attempt to muddy the waters about its culpability in the cyclospora outbreak has been well documented. After the FDA traced the outbreak to their lettuce, Taylor Farms met with White House and FDA officials to “distance the company from the outbreak and cast doubt” on their connection to the outbreak according to the New York Times. The company later claimed the government had apologized to them after publicizing a false positive test of their lettuce, which the FDA denied, clarifying that there was still overwhelming evidence linking Taylor Farms to the outbreak.
Even before the outbreak, Taylor Farms had attempted to get in the administration’s good graces. The company contributed $1 million to MAGA Inc. in March 2025 and later hired Trent Morse, the former deputy director of the White Presidential Personnel Office. They’ve spent $810,000 on direct federal lobbying during the administration, which doesn’t include their memberships in the industry’s trade associations. One such group, the International Fresh Produce Association, was part of a successful industry push to delay the compliance deadline of the FDA’s Food Traceability Rule.
Successful congressional oversight must look into Taylor Farms’ market power and influence campaign, as well as Trump administration corruption and incompetence, to adequately understand how the government can address the food safety crisis. Thankfully, congressional Democrats have ignored Kovacevich’s wishes in this case and requested documents from Taylor Farms in the course of their cyclospora investigations.
This can serve as a case study for the next Congress across a host of issue areas, especially when those requests can be backed up with the force of congressional subpoenas. Indeed, even Kovacevich acknowledged that, “[u]nlike Trump, companies and CEOs will comply with subpoenas.” (If companies do seek to resist, that can also be good politics, as we have previously urged vigorous enforcement of subpoenas on recalcitrant potential witnesses like Kovacevich’s patrons at Google.)
A hearing on the details of food safety regulations and inspection and tracing capacity, while important, isn’t exactly riveting to the general public. Forcing the CEO of Taylor Farms and other corporate executives to testify about their consolidation strategies, workplace safety record, and efforts to influence the Trump administration amid a rampant diarrhea outbreak, however, would be more likely to garner widespread coverage and attention. Especially if people forced to suffer from explosive diarrhea are given a chance to sit at the witness table next to the corporate executive who brought about their suffering—would such a confrontation violate norms, be a bit awkward for a rich person, expose real insight into a public policy issue that a corporation wants to flush away from the public’s attention, and generate real clickable attention? All of the above!
If Democrats regain control of either chamber this November, they can replicate this gameplan across a host of issues and industries—including (though certainly not limited to) the Chamber of Progress’ Big Tech backers, as I’m sure the public would love some answers from tech executives on the much despised proliferation of AI data centers and the industry’s infiltration of the Trump administration.
Image Credit: “Iceberg” by arbyreed is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.