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In March 2025, shortly after his return to power, Donald Trump’s administration postponed the compliance deadline for the FDA’s Food Traceability Rule by 30 months. That moved it back from January 20, 2026, to July 20, 2028. We are now paying the price.
At the time, the administration claimed that there were complex supply chain challenges. It used language in an appropriations rider to prevent the use of federal funds for enforcement before the July 2028 date. The primary goal of the Traceability Rule was to enable faster identification and rapid removal of potentially contaminated food from our supply, lessening foodborne illnesses and deaths.
Taylor Farms (the parent company of Taylor Fresh Foods) donated $1 million to MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC, on March 26, 2025, just days after the Traceability Rule extension. It’s not hard to follow the money.
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Now, we’ve learned Taylor Farms' produce is behind a major outbreak of Cyclospora. Even though the company is a serial offender, it took the FDA a month after it developed the link to travel to inspect the farm in Mexico believed to be responsible.
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In other words, corruption isn’t just a one-sided offense, where people in power make money through the grift. There’s another side to the equation: the people who are harmed by its consequences. We’re seeing that plainly now when it comes to foodborne illness. There is no telling where else it will crop up as this administration and its key players continue to benefit wherever they can from their time in office.
DOJ has statutory authority to act here. But they seem to be asleep at the wheel. Of course, DOJ’s investigations aren’t always public, but given this administration’s love of the tweet, it’s reasonable to expect they’d be taking credit if they were doing something about it. There have been at least two deaths and over 13,000 cases, just of Cyclospora. Many other food contamination issues are being reported now, as well. It’s difficult to assess whether the statistics are reliable or just the tip of the iceberg.
As DOJ’s website explains, “The Department of Justice (DOJ), working with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) through its Health & Safety Unit and Consumer Protection Branch, prosecutes companies and executives under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) for introducing adulterated foods into interstate commerce. Charges range from strict-liability misdemeanors to felony indictments and permanent injunctions.”
What could DOJ be doing? This is an area I discuss with my first-year criminal law students because it involves unusual strict liability. Normally, to prove a crime, prosecutors must show both an actus reus, a criminal act, and mens rea, a guilty state of mind like intent or recklessness. But under the FDCA, distributing adulterated food is a strict-liability misdemeanor. Prosecutors do not need to prove that a company or executive intended to violate the law or knew the food was contaminated. And under the Park doctrine, corporate officers can be prosecuted personally for corporate safety failures.
There are also felony charges available in cases of intentional fraud, deliberate concealment of safety data, or repeat offenses. Companies can face millions of dollars in fines and asset forfeiture, while individual executives can face personal fines and imprisonment. Under 21 U.S.C. § 331, it is illegal to manufacture, sell, deliver, or receive an adulterated food product in interstate commerce. But we’ve seen nothing to suggest any criminal violations are being explored here. Perhaps that will happen as public outrage grows, but one way to bring problems under control is to create deterrence by prosecuting known offenders and being public about it so others will be more careful.
To protect public health, DOJ routinely files civil complaints to secure injunctions that force companies to stop distributing items that are making Americans sick until their facilities come into compliance with the law and pass a review by independent experts. But even after the outrage when people realized it took the FDA a month to act, nothing has been forthcoming from DOJ, which could be taking immediate steps to protect Americans’ health from additional problems.
In the middle of all of this, Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, Heidi Overton, says the FDA, CDC, and NIH need to be “reformed” to fund more “conservative-based” research instead of peer-reviewed and evidence-backed medical science. Overton is a surgeon, currently working as the deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy at the White House. She is an alum of the conservative America First Policy Institute, where she wrote in opposition to gender-affirming care for minors and questioned the safety of medication abortion despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It feels like the era of conservative religious beliefs instead of science is upon us.
This is what happens when institutions break down. This is how the rule of law and those “cumbersome requirements” big business complains the federal bureaucracy imposes on it work to protect us. There are reasons we want those agencies to do their jobs. But sometimes, it’s not apparent until it all breaks down, as it has in this critical area. Heather Cox Richardson characterized it like this earlier this week: “It’s the largest cyclospora outbreak in U.S. history, spurred by cuts of more than 40% to food safety detection systems.”
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been posting each fresh report of a new issue in the food supply on our family chat:
Finally, one of the kids posted back, “Mom, you need to stop getting your news from Instagram.” But isn’t that the problem here? We aren’t getting a comprehensive report from the government. There are no adults in the room. And so we’re left to fend for ourselves, discerning whether each new report is true or false and what it means we need to do about it. I haven’t eaten a salad in the last month that wasn’t made with lettuce I didn’t grow myself and I’ve abandoned my beloved blueberry muffins. But for many Americans, it’s about more than giving up favorite foods. It’s about being sick because Taylor Farms wanted to make more money, and the Trump administration was okay with that.
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