A big problem for trust in government is that high-quality governance is usually invisible. When the various agencies designed to protect the American people from all manner of threats are working perfectly, most potential disasters are detected and prevented before they happen. A lot of highly trained government workers do diligent and difficult work for little pay and less recognition, heading off crisis after crisis, and the ignorant swing-voting layman assumes that all his tax dollars are being squandered.
So one hopes that the voting public is learning a hard—or I should say watery—lesson about how important good government is, by way of the manifold consequences of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Robert Kennedy hacking away at American state capacity. The latest consequence can be heard in the groaning emanating from thousands of bathrooms across the country: the worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history. It deserves a name, so I’m calling it the MAHA Trots.
Cyclosporiasis is caused by Cyclospora cayetanensis, a single-celled parasite that lives exclusively in humans and causes particularly violent and long-lasting diarrhea. Infection is almost always through ingesting food or water contaminated with feces containing cyclospora oocysts; these take many days to become infectious, so person-to-person transmission is very unlikely. The oocysts are difficult to wash off and resistant to common disinfectants, including vinegar and bleach, so the only reliable way to kill them is by cooking past 158 degrees Fahrenheit.
In an American context, cyclosporiasis outbreaks are almost always caused by improper sanitation at farms or food processing facilities. Farmers around the world routinely refuse to provide adequate toilet or handwashing facilities for their workers if they think they can get away with it, to save money. When exploited raspberry or spinach pickers have no choice but to relieve themselves in a hole next to the field of crops, the potential consequences are obvious. A 2013 outbreak in Texas, for instance, was tied to contaminated cilantro. Contaminated irrigation water is another potential culprit.
On the food side of the equation, Trump has wreaked havoc on American food safety infrastructure.
Now, it is difficult to prove with 100 percent confidence that this outbreak would not have happened under a Democratic president. One can’t demonstrate that one of the food safety experts fired by Musk, Russ Vought, or Kennedy would have discovered its source and thus squelched the outbreak by now, precisely because they weren’t on the job. But the circumstantial case is overwhelming.
On the food side of the equation, Trump has wreaked havoc on American food safety infrastructure. As part of his initial wholesale attack on state capacity in February 2025, he dissolved the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which was set up under President Reagan in 1988 to provide scientific advice and coordinate best practices for defending against dangerous microbes at all levels of government. Wouldn’t you know it, just before being destroyed the committee was working on advice regarding foodborne illness outbreaks.
By February 2026, USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service had lost 913 staff, while the Food and Nutrition Service lost 564. The agency’s National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection was also axed. All told, more than 20,000 workers left USDA last year.
The damage to American public-health infrastructure has been just as bad. The Centers for Disease Control, whose primary task is understanding and combating disease outbreaks like this one, has lost nearly 3,000 staff under Trump, while the Food and Drug Administration has lost more than 4,000. Food safety inspections have been going undone as a result. In February 2025, FDA Deputy Commissioner Jim Jones angrily resigned from the agency’s Human Foods Program, which monitors food safety, after dozens of his workers were sacked. And in July that year, Kennedy directed the CDC to cut six out of eight pathogens, cyclospora among them, monitored as part of its FoodNet program.
In addition to Trump’s deranged crusade against public health, he has also loudly signaled that big corporations can commit whatever crimes they want. Foxes are in every regulatory henhouse—that is, the ones that haven’t been de facto shuttered, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Are we really to believe that Trump cut numerous programs for disease prevention, tracking, and containment, including some that specifically tracked cyclospora, as well as damaging state capacity across the board, and gravely damaging the morale of the federal workers who haven’t yet been fired, and then the worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history happens immediately afterward purely by coincidence? Come on.
Some state health departments are doing what they can. Michigan, notably, has counted 3,762 cases at time of writing, as compared to the CDC’s 1,645, and identified salad greens as a possible—not confirmed!—culprit. But as Katrine Wallace points out at Stat News, most state health departments are not really equipped to collect and compare case information across multiple states. Coordinating national responses to national problems is the most basic responsibility of the federal government, and under Trump it just is not happening. We might not figure out what is going on until cases are seen in Minnesota, whose health department has the best disease investigators in the country. That’s likely the only state that can do the CDC’s job for it and track down disease outbreaks outside its borders.
The MAHA Trots aren’t the only problem caused by Trump’s savaging of the American administrative state. There is a festering screwworm outbreak caused in part by Elon Musk’s destruction of USAID. There is a festering measles outbreak that is both not being contained by RFK’s gutted CDC, and caused in part by him personally, through his yearslong history of spewing anti-vaccine misinformation. Weather forecasts have become notably less accurate due to Trump’s budget cuts grounding half the government’s weather balloons.
Republicans have been dreaming of overturning the New Deal ever since it was passed and returning America to an imagined 19th-century utopia with a federal government that barely exists. We’ve got just a small taste of what that would mean today, and the flavor smacks of parasitic protozoan.
