Democrats blame RFK Jr. for food outbreaks and recalls. Experts say it’s more complicated

Democrats, including Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), wrote to Kennedy in July demanding answers about the “foolish and self-indulgent demolition” of the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, which has historically tracked cyclospora.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is also viewed as a possible 2028 Democratic presidential contender, framed the outbreaks and other recalls boosted by his party as a referendum on the Trump administration.

“Every morning there’s some new frustration at home connected to some new outrage coming out of Washington,” Buttigieg said at a campaign event. “You check the news, and there is another kind of food that you have to think twice about getting in case it’s not safe to eat, which might have something to do with how they cut the food safety inspectors at the [Food and Drug Administration] and the Department of Agriculture.”

The Department of Health and Human Services, however, in a statement to the Washington Examiner, championed the administration’s response to foodborne illness outbreaks and disputed the idea that scaling back personnel hindered investigations.

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“Politicizing foodborne illness outbreaks and recalls is irresponsible and undermines the work of public health officials protecting Americans every day,” an HHS spokesperson said. “The Trump Administration has mounted a robust response to each outbreak, including the recently concluded Cyclospora outbreak, working closely with health departments in all 50 states to promptly identify known sources and provide Americans with the information they need to protect themselves.

“FDA continues to have the staff required for outbreak investigations — no FDA investigators were affected by staffing changes or reductions in force. The CDC laboratory supporting foodborne outbreak investigations was not impacted by reductions in force, and the agency maintains a dedicated team investigating foodborne outbreaks and working closely with state and local health departments.”

Foodborne outbreaks are difficult to trace

Foodborne illness outbreaks are hardly unusual in the United States, even if the scale of this summer’s cyclospora outbreak was.

Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, said the country sees “dozens and dozens” of foodborne illness outbreaks each year involving pathogens such as E. coli, salmonella, and cyclospora.

“We’ve had multiple outbreaks,” Adalja said. “That happens every year. It’s just that the size and scope of the cyclospora outbreak was unprecedented, which put a lot of … interest into foodborne illnesses generally.”

Finding the source of an outbreak, however, is considerably more complicated than identifying that people are getting sick, Adalja said.

Investigators first have to recognize and diagnose the illness, a process that can itself create delays because some pathogens are not included in routine testing. Public health officials then begin what Adalja described as “shoe leather epidemiology”: interviewing patients about where and what they ate, looking for commonalities and tracing potentially contaminated food backward through an often sprawling supply chain.

“That can be very hard because if I ask you, ‘What did you have last Thursday for dinner?’ you’re probably not going to remember,” Adalja said.

Once investigators identify a possible common food, they must determine its source and where other products from the same supplier were sent.

“You’re tracing it all back to try and understand where the origin might be to find where the point of contamination might have occurred,” Adalja said.

The size of the cyclospora outbreak made that work especially difficult. But Adalja said resources matter, arguing that a better-staffed public health system can work through those steps more quickly.

“Yes, any food board investigation is going to be arduous, but the more hands on deck you have, the more you can assist states to do this work,” he said.

That distinction complicates attempts to assign the outbreak entirely to the Trump administration’s personnel and surveillance changes or the inherent difficulty of investigating foodborne illness.

Dr. David Acheson, a former FDA associate commissioner for foods who now leads the food safety consulting firm The Acheson Group, offered a different assessment of one criticism aimed at the administration.

Acheson said that removing cyclospora from FoodNet would not have prevented or substantially accelerated the identification of this particular outbreak.

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Instead, Acheson said its sheer size overwhelmed a public health system that has long faced resource constraints at the federal, state, and local levels.

“You’ve got 15,000 sick people, and every one of them you’ve got to call, ‘Where did you eat? What did you eat?’” Acheson said. “They couldn’t do it. There were just not enough people to do it.” 

Recalls are a routine part of the food safety system

The heightened attention surrounding the cyclospora outbreak has also put a spotlight on another, related system: recalls. But a recall does not necessarily mean anyone has gotten sick, and Acheson said the sheer number of recalls is not, on its own, a measure of whether the food supply has become less safe.

“Recalls happen every single day of the week,” Acheson said. “There are literally hundreds of recalls a year in the United States.”

Some recalls follow an outbreak after investigators identify a contaminated product. Others occur before a single illness is reported, when a manufacturer discovers a possible problem and pulls the product from shelves as a precaution.

In those cases, Acheson said, a recall should be understood as a preventive action rather than evidence that the regulatory system has failed.

“A recall is actually a preventive tool,” he said.

Recalls also vary in severity. A product can be pulled because it contains a dangerous pathogen, foreign material such as metal, or because its packaging fails to disclose an allergen.

“Allergen mislabelling is the commonest cause of recalls, and frankly is rarely associated with illness,” he said, acknowledging that labeling problems receive far less public attention than outbreaks involving illness or deaths.

The number of recalls has remained relatively steady, Acheson said, although individual recalls have become larger and more complicated as food supply chains have expanded, meaning more products and consumers can be swept in a single action.

A recall does not necessarily mean every product being pulled is contaminated. If salmonella is detected in one item from a production lot, for example, manufacturers and regulators pull the affected lot rather than testing tens of thousands of individual products.

“All they know is that that lot tested positive, and therefore we don’t know if it’s 50% contamination, point 00 1% or 100%,” Acheson said. “But either way, don’t eat it because there’s a risk, and we don’t want you to get sick.”

Responsibility for preventing those problems begins with companies producing food, Acheson said, while federal regulators establish safety requirements and ensure businesses comply with them.

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“The responsibility to make sure your chickens aren’t full of salmonella is on the industry,” he said. “It’s not on the regulators.”

That does insulate federal agencies from scrutiny. Acheson said regulators can be faulted when inspections miss problems or enforcement falls short, and he said the loss of experienced personnel at agencies such as the FDA and the USDA is harmful to food safety. Still,  regulators cannot monitor every food facility.