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There’s something undeniably fishy about the Trump administration’s handling of the rising outbreak of an explosive diarrhea-causing parasite — and we’re not talking about tainted iceberg lettuce.
On Saturday, the FDA announced that it had found traces of the Cyclospora cayetanensis parasite — which more than likely won’t kill you, but will almost certainly cause weeks of violent diarrhea — in samples of bagged shredded lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms, one of Taco Bell’s lead suppliers.
One day later, the agency suddenly reversed its decision, announcing that its test results were a false positive, seemingly exonerating Taylor Farms. The company is still carrying out a voluntary recall of the offending greens, a move first announced on Friday.
The unexpected twists and turns of the devastating outbreak highlight how the Trump administration is struggling to get coherent messaging out to the American people, a public health disaster facilitated by massive health budget cuts and major layoffs at the FDA, USDA, and CDC. We still don’t know exactly how many people are affected, numbers that vary wildly depending on whether you ask the CDC or individual states. It’s a confounding mess, compounded by the fact that the parasite is notoriously difficult to trace in a lab.
There are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of the FDA’s baffling reversal on Sunday. For one, the Trump administration’s relationship with the embattled food supplier goes way back. Case in point, Taylor Farms made a mysterious $1 million donation to the Trump-aligned super PAC MAGA Inc on March 26, 2025, as first spotted by lawyer and public health policy leader Matthew Cortland — six days before the FDA loosened food traceability rules which could’ve helped prevent outbreaks like the current one.
The company appears to have considerable sway in Washington, DC. On July 17, a day before the FDA announced it had found traces of the parasite, the New York Times reported that Taylor Farms representatives had met with White House and FDA officials the day before to discuss what the company viewed as “shortfalls in the FDA and CDC’s outbreak response process.”
While it’s unclear whether the supplier successfully strong-armed the FDA into going back on its initial claims of having found traces of the parasite, the timelines are certainly suspect. According to the NYT, Taylor Farms had also hired lobbyist Trent Morse, who served as the deputy director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office before he resigned in September.
The story only gets stranger after the FDA issued its mea culpa. In the early morning hours of Monday, Taylor Farms published an “update” — which has since been deleted for an unknown reason — claiming that the FDA had “apologized to us” while trying to reassure customers that “all other Taylor Farms products… are not involved in the recall.”
Less than 12 hours later, the FDA once again pulled a 180.
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