The US is currently experiencing its largest ever recorded outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a disease caused by infection with the Cyclospora parasite. The disease is typically acquired via fecal-contaminated food or drink, and can cause explosive diarrhea and severe, lingering stomach cramps. Those who contract it generally have a terrible time. Experts have yet to conclusively identify the source of the outbreak, which continues unabated. Recent tests implicating Taylor Farms have been withdrawn as false positives, though Taylor Farms’ lettuce remains a primary suspect in the ongoing investigation. 

After presiding over the COVID-19 crisis, one might imagine a presidential administration would be eager to prevent another public health catastrophe from occurring under its watch. The Trump Administration, however, has taken pains to weaken the resilience of the already limited and chronically underfunded public health infrastructure in the US. As a result, this latest outbreak is unfolding in a system that is even more diminished and underresourced than it was in 2020.

After presiding over the COVID-19 crisis, one might imagine a presidential administration would be eager to prevent another public health catastrophe from occurring under its watch. The Trump Administration, however, has taken pains to weaken the resilience of the already limited and chronically underfunded public health infrastructure in the US.

First, it is worth noting that fecal contamination can happen when farm workers are not given adequate bathroom breaks. Rather than protecting farm workers, however, the Trump administration has made it harder for them to challenge unsafe conditions. In June 2025, the Labor Department suspended enforcement of a rule that expressly protected H-2A agricultural guestworkers from retaliation for filing workplace safety complaints or consulting with worker advocates. The administration subsequently proposed rescinding those protections altogether. 

Another example of the second Trump administration’s handiwork is their changes to the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet. FoodNet is useful because it conducts active surveillance of foodborne diseases. Rather than waiting for private laboratories to send results, FoodNet staff regularly inquire about new disease cases and conduct audits to ensure cases are not missed. This proactive, standardized approach helps public health officials identify more cases earlier than systems that wait for reports to move passively up the chain. FoodNet is a joint program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service, and the state health departments where the sites are located. There are FoodNet surveillance sites in ten states, covering 62.6 million people (Figure 1). 

Figure 1

FoodNet previously tracked cases of cyclosporiasis. In July of 2025, however, the Trump administration made FoodNet’s reporting of cyclosporiasis optional, mandating FoodNet tracking only for salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. The administration justified the change as a way to conserve resources and avoid duplication, conflating FoodNet’s active surveillance with more passive surveillance systems such as the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS). The CDC’s own surveillance manual notes that active surveillance systems have been shown to increase reporting. Other empirical research has yielded similar results, with one study finding that the rate of disease reporting doubled when active surveillance practices were used, and that the disease reports themselves were more likely to be complete than those obtained through passive reporting structures.

Unfortunately, FoodNet’s reach was already limited, covering only about 16 percent of the US population. The CDC maintains that FoodNet is not intended to detect individual outbreaks, and is geared more toward measuring disease burden over time. Rather than expanding it to make it more useful for monitoring active outbreaks, however, the Trump administration significantly weakened the program by reducing the number of diseases it was required to track, undermining even its utility as a historical dataset. This will also make it difficult to determine whether foodborne illness increased under their watch.

The changes to FoodNet did not occur in a vacuum. In February 2025, the administration eliminated the USDA’s National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which was working on best-practice guidelines to combat foodborne illnesses shortly before its dissolution. In April 2025, federal workforce cuts forced the suspension of the Food Emergency Response Network proficiency testing program, which ensured that the network’s 170 food-testing laboratories could produce quality results during an emergency. The Trump Administration also downsized the CDC’s parasite surveillance team from eleven to just three. Zooming out, important institutions have been hollowed out: the USDA has shed 24,000 workers (an almost 27 percent reduction), the CDC has lost nearly 3,000 (roughly a quarter of its workforce), and the FDA is down more than 4,000 (almost a fifth of its workforce).

Many of these cuts were initiated at the direction of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. DOGE’s handiwork should certainly allow for more efficient spread of diseases like cyclosporiasis. Given the cost of such outbreaks, however, the more economically sensible path would have been to invest in public health rather than shortchanging it. In any case, there is no evidence that the Trump administration slashed programs based on some careful cost-benefit analysis. Instead, the cuts appear to be part of the administration’s reckless and shortsighted pattern of hollowing out the federal government’s ability to serve the public. 

Cyclospora is exactly the kind of pathogen for which timely, comprehensive surveillance matters. The incubation period for cyclosporiasis is 2 to 14 days after exposure, making it difficult to track because people often struggle to remember exactly what they ate during that period. Active surveillance is better equipped to compensate for this, however, because it both picks up more cases and collects more complete records. This enables officials to identify clusters sooner despite shaky recollections from individual patients. Making active surveillance optional removed an important source of systematic, standardized data just before a major surge that has proved difficult to characterize and trace.

In public health, it is important to have robust systems in place before a crisis occurs. An outbreak that can be contained in its early stages may become difficult or impossible to control once it spreads. Yet these systems often become victims of their own success. Successful prevention means that the public never sees the disasters that were averted and may underestimate the scale of the danger those systems were designed to contain. The Trump administration appears to have doubled down on this terrible inclination, and people are paying for it with their bowels.

A Republican-controlled House committee passed legislation earlier this week that would prevent the US Labor Department from enacting federal standards to protect workers from extreme heat, a move that came amid sweltering heat across the country.

The Heat Workforce Standards Act, led by Rep. Mark Messmer (R-Ind.), passed the House Education and Workforce Committee on Tuesday in a 18-15 vote along party lines. If enacted, the legislation would bar the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from implementing nationwide heat protections for workers—including those proposed by the Biden administration in 2024.

The Biden Labor Department estimated that its proposed rules would protect around 36 million workers. Trump’s Labor Department has done nothing to move forward with the Biden-era proposal.

The AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in the US, has condemned the GOP bill, noting that “extreme heat is one of the deadliest workplace hazards in America.”

“House lawmakers are considering legislation that would block OSHA from issuing or enforcing a federal heat safety standard,” the labor group said earlier this week. “That’s the wrong direction when workers’ lives are on the line.”

Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, a coalition of labor unions and advocacy groups wrote in a letter to members of Congress that the Republican legislation “would permanently remove the federal government’s authority to address a workplace hazard that is already resulting in worker fatalities.”

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 55 worker deaths from heat exposure in 2023, a number that safety researchers widely consider to be an undercount due to frequent misclassification or underreporting of heat-related illnesses and fatalities,” the coalition wrote. “More broadly, heat-related deaths in the United States have more than doubled since 1999, and extreme heat now claims more lives each year than any other weather-related hazard.”

“Workers have no control over extreme heat, and many are unable to refuse hazardous assignments without jeopardizing their livelihoods,” the groups added. “Congress should not respond to an escalating occupational hazard by permanently removing the Department of Labor’s authority to address it.”

The Groundwork Collaborative, Workshop, and Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy estimated in a report published earlier this year that basic, federal workplace heat protections could save up to 1,500 lives annually. The report observed that major industry groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce, have mobilized against proposed national heat protections.

“Companies like Amazon and the United Parcel Service (UPS) that employ hundreds of thousands of workers subjected to extreme workplace temperatures make public statements about their commitments to worker safety while actively lobbying to weaken or block heat regulations,” the report noted. “As extreme heat intensifies, the cost of inaction will be measured in lives lost. The question facing policymakers is no longer whether effective protections exist, but whether they have the political will to stand up to those unscrupulous employers lobbying hard to block them.”

As wildfires raged across Canada on Thursday, sending dangerous smoke across the border into major US cities, climate advocates called for accountability for the fossil fuel industry, which knew for decades that its products were largely responsible for the climate crisis, yet chose to push climate denial instead.

While fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of Canada’s boreal forests, the heating of the atmosphere due to the burning of oil, gas, and coal has made fires more frequent and extreme.

“We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil,” the youth-led Sunrise Movement wrote on social media in response to the fires.

We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil. https://t.co/nHhbDXB06X

— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) July 16, 2026

Climate Defiance agreed, posting, “Nuremberg-style trials are in order for the fossil fuel executives who knew what they were doing to our children’s futures and did anyway.”

There were 884 fires burning in Canada on Thursday, with 124 out of control, according to the country’s national wildland fire summary. Over 100 fires were raging in Ontario alone, where they have forced the evacuation of at least 15 rural communities; destroyed homes in the Indigenous community of Collins First Nation, or Namaygoosisagagun; and polluted the skies over parts of the upper Midwest and Northeastern US.

As of Thursday evening Eastern time, the four cities with the worst air quality in the world were Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Toronto, according to IQAir.

People have shared dramatic footage of the fires on social media. One video shows a train moving through a blaze near Armstrong, Ontario. Thankfully, all crew members were evacuated safely, The Guardian reported.

This is near Armstrong, Ontario.

When will the Canadian National Railway Company make a statement about this incident? pic.twitter.com/6bKJYugeR0

— Sol Mamakwa (@solmamakwa) July 14, 2026

Indigenous photographer Nadya Kwandibens shared images of flames rising over a lake with the words, “”My family hometown, Collins Ontario, is GONE.“

View this post on Instagram

Residents of the community fled the blaze in boats before the flames damaged and destroyed several homes and other structures, according to CBC News.

“Collins has burned to the ground. This is a tragedy and we are grateful that everyone got out safely,” Lise Vaugeois, the provincial representative for the region, said, as The Guardian reported. “Fires are part of a natural cycle, but the extreme temperatures we are experiencing across the county and the growing severity of weather events are indicators of climate change.”

Laura Chasmer, a professor of geography and the environment at the University of Western Ontario, noted that fires in Canada like the ones raging across Ontario have increased since 2015.

“This is associated with some of the extreme climate warming that we’ve been seeing, and the atmospheric drying of the surface,” she told BBC News.

Brandi Morin, a Cree-Iroquois-French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, noted in her Substack that Canada was warming at twice the global average. Despite this, the Canadian government has made progress on three major fossil fuel pipelines this July.

“Every barrel these new pipelines are built to move adds to the exact warming that’s turning our boreal forests into tinder,” Morin wrote.

On the other side of the border, Michigan regulators late Wednesday approved important permits from the controversial Enbridge Line 5 pipeline.

Political leaders and climate advocates responded to the fires and smoke with calls to abandon fossil fuel projects, transition to renewable energy, and hold oil and gas companies accountable for the harms they have caused.

“We have the technology and the policy roadmap to replace fossil fuels with green energy extremely rapidly. The only thing stopping us is a handful of billionaires getting rich while our world burns,” the Sunrise Movement said.

We have the technology and the policy roadmap to replace fossil fuels with green energy extremely rapidly.

The only thing stopping us is a handful of billionaires getting rich while our world burns. https://t.co/6oqGxoC8m3

— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) July 16, 2026

As smoke drifted over Boston on Wednesday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote on social media: “Look outside in Massachusetts right now. The climate crisis is here. Wildfire smoke is suffocating our communities and our children are breathing dirty air. We need a Green New Deal.”

Look outside in Massachusetts right now. The climate crisis is here. Wildfire smoke is suffocating our communities and our children are breathing dirty air. We need a Green New Deal. https://t.co/pXo5XOOt0q

— Ed Markey (@EdMarkey) July 15, 2026

“Climate change isn’t a tragedy, it’s a crime. The fossil fuel industry are arsonists at a global scale. It’s their pollution that’s fueling these horrific wildfires,” Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, told Common Dreams. “Instead of approving new pipelines, the Canadian government should be holding the industry accountable and using their record profits to help communities on the frontlines of this crisis.”