Right before the 2024 election, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was initially being floated as Trump’s pick to lead Health and Human Services, he posted this:
FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can't be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.
I responded to this on Bluesky by simply saying “Welcome to the Age of Diarrhea,” a comment more prescient than I could have imagined as we’re now nearing the fourth month of a cyclospora outbreak that has left thousands of Americans toilet-ridden.
It does seem like the Trump administration bears some responsibility for the situation. The CDC (in collaboration with other agencies) maintains a program called the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet), and in 2025 the administration made reporting cyclospora infections to FoodNet optional. That can’t have helped, though FoodNet is intended to track trends more than catch outbreaks. More importantly, Trump 2.0 has seen massive cuts across a host of relevant agencies. The CDC has reportedly cut 25% of its staff and 35% of its contracts. The parasitic disease division lost $40M in funding when the administration illegally dismantled USAID, and nearly $6B in CDC state grants have been cut.
All of this has clearly degraded the government’s ability to track and respond to an outbreak. But the rot doesn’t stop there. There are indications that the White House coordinated with Taylor Farms, the primary source of the cyclospora outbreak, to downplay the company’s role. Per Bloomberg, the White House allowed the deadline for Taylor Farms to initiate a recall to come and go, and ultimately put out a statement that shifted blame to Taco Bell, a Taylor Farms customer:
In an internal call, the White House aides approved statements from the public health agencies for public release — though they still only identified Taco Bell as linked to the outbreak, without naming Taylor Farms specifically.
If you’re wondering why the White House would play favorites in a situation like this, it may be that Taylor Farms gave $1M to a Trump PAC last year. Or maybe not, but the fact that Trump can be bought always leaves open the possibility that he was.
The early weeks of the outbreak were marked mostly by widespread confusion and paranoia. As recently as mid-July, consumers were in the dark about the outbreak’s source. That left them speculating online, fostering conspiracies and half-baked theories about the origin.
That, I expect, will be the defining feature of public policy (and particularly public health) post-Trump. Not that you’ll be able to trace every policy disaster back to Trump, but that you won’t be able to trace them at all. The apparatus of public knowledge is being scaled back at nearly every level of government. There’s both less transparency and less information. You’ll see the illness, but you won’t know its source.
We’ve seen the same process unfold across the regulatory state. Last September, Trump’s EPA gutted the Greenhouse Gas Reporting program, which had required carbon emissions to be publicly disclosed. The mere requirement of transparency had driven down emissions considerably, but the administration proposed eliminating reporting in nearly every category. The EPA also canceled hundreds of grants that provided for pollution monitoring and cleanup.
Anti-transparency is a fundamental pillar of right-wing politics. The right of powerful people to do as they please is only useful if it’s free of consequences, and the only way to assure that is if no one knows what they’re doing. Clarence Thomas has spent decades arguing that disclosure laws are unconstitutional, and has increasingly pulled his conservative colleagues to his side. Transparency, he worries, could lead to “reprisals” from an angry public.
The project here, in other words, is a lot bigger than RFK Jr’s conspiracism and anti-establishment hang-ups. It’s the bulwark of an ideology of impunity that extends to every facet of fascist politics.
We’ve seen more measles cases since Trump took office than we did in the previous 25 years combined. Of course, we know that because we have a robust infrastructure for tracking measles. That’s not naturally-occurring, it’s something that was built, and something that can be destroyed. As the administration has pulled back funding from state and local health departments, some states have already reported increasing difficulties with measles surveillance.
And that’s the tip of the iceberg. The administration’s cuts have helped facilitate the return of screwworm, which can devastate livestock. They’ve disrupted attempts to curb malaria, which the CDC has warned could return to the United States. They nearly resulted (before the effort was thwarted by Congress) in the removal of deep-sea monitoring equipment that helps track a deadly flesh-eating bacteria that has appeared in multiple states.
All of this builds toward a sort of ambient misery, where we’re all made sicker and more precarious but deprived of the tools to solve the problem or even understand what exactly went wrong. Which makes the cyclospora outbreak a perfect Trump-era capsule. You find yourself with explosive diarrhea and are left to wonder whether this is somehow Donald Trump’s fault. You might never know.
