The White House said Thursday that it “has a handle on” the growing cyclosporiasis outbreak that’s giving thousands of people across the U.S. explosive diarrhea and is providing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration the “resources they need” to address it.
But as the illness spreads across the country, public health experts are pointing to what they say has been a yearslong breakdown in how the federal government responds to food safety incidents.
“Funding for food safety has not been maintained over the last several years, not just with this administration,” Thomas Moore, a professor of medicine at the University of Kansas, said during a Thursday morning briefing with reporters. Those cuts, he said, became “more acute” during the period that the White House’s cost-cutting operation DOGE was operating within the federal agencies.