A big problem with trust in government is that high-quality governance tends to be invisible. When the various agencies charged with protecting the American people from all kinds of threats work perfectly, most potential disasters are detected and prevented before they occur. Many highly qualified public servants do hard, hard work for little pay and less recognition, preventing crisis after crisis, while the ignorant lay voter tends to assume that all his tax dollars are being wasted.
So hopefully voters will learn the hard—or should I say, watery—lesson about the importance of good government through the many consequences of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy’s hacking of the American state. The latest consequence can be heard in the groans coming from thousands of bathrooms across the country: the worst outbreak of cyclosporiasis in American history. It deserves a name, so I call it MAHA Trots.
Other works by Ryan Cooper
Cyclosporiasis is caused by Cyclospora caietanicaa single-celled parasite that lives exclusively in the human body and causes particularly severe and long-lasting diarrhea. Infection almost always occurs through consumption of food or water contaminated with feces containing Cyclospora oocysts; They take many days to become infectious, so person-to-person transmission is very unlikely. Oocysts are difficult to wash off and are resistant to common disinfectants, including vinegar and bleach, so the only reliable way to kill them is to cook at temperatures above 158 degrees Fahrenheit.
In the American context, outbreaks of cyclosporiasis are almost always caused by inadequate sanitation conditions on farms or food processing plants. Farmers around the world routinely refuse to provide their workers with adequate toilets and handwashing facilities if they think they can get away with it, in order to save money. When exploited raspberry or spinach pickers are left with no choice but to relieve themselves in a hole next to their crop fields, the potential consequences are clear. For example, a 2013 outbreak in Texas was linked to contaminated cilantro. Contaminated irrigation water is another potential culprit.
On the food side of the equation, Trump has damaged America’s food safety infrastructure.
It is now difficult to prove with 100 percent certainty that this outbreak would not have occurred under a Democratic president. No one can demonstrate that one of the food safety experts fired by Musk, Russ Vaught or Kennedy would have discovered its source and thus quelled the outbreak by now precisely because they were not on duty. But the circumstantial case is overwhelming.
On the food side of the equation, Trump has damaged America’s food safety infrastructure. As part of his initial massive attack on government capacity, in February 2025, he disbanded the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Food Products, which was created under President Reagan in 1988 to provide scientific advice and coordinate best practices for protecting against dangerous microbes at all levels of government. Wouldn’t you know it, just before it was destroyed, the committee was working on recommendations regarding foodborne illness outbreaks.
By February 2026, the USDA Food Safety Inspection Service had lost 913 employees, and the Food and Nutrition Service had lost 564 employees. The agency’s National Meat and Poultry Inspection Advisory Committee was also fired. In total, more than 20,000 workers left the USDA last year.
The damage to America’s public health infrastructure was equally severe. The Centers for Disease Control, whose primary mission is understanding and fighting disease outbreaks like this one, has lost nearly 3,000 employees under Trump, and the Food and Drug Administration has lost more than 4,000. As a result, food safety inspections were canceled. In February 2025, FDA Deputy Commissioner Jim Jones angrily resigned from the agency’s food safety program after dozens of his employees were fired. And in July of that year, Kennedy directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to eliminate six of the eight pathogens, including Cyclospora, monitored under the FoodNet program.
In addition to Trump’s insane crusade against public health, he has also made it clear that large corporations can commit any crimes they want. There are foxes in every regulated coop, that is, those that are not de facto closed, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Are we really to believe that Trump cut numerous disease prevention, tracking and containment programs, including those that specifically tracked cyclosporiasis, while also damaging state capacity across the board and severely damaging the morale of federal workers who had not yet been laid off, and then immediately, by sheer luck, the worst outbreak of cyclosporiasis in American history occurred? Come on then.
Some state health departments are doing the best they can. Michigan in particular has counted 3,762 cases as of this writing, compared to 1,645 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and has defined salad greens as possible– not confirmed! – the culprit. But as Katherine Wallace points out at Stat News, most state health departments aren’t 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, that simply isn’t happening. We may not be able to understand what’s going on until cases are identified in Minnesota, whose health department has some of the best disease researchers in the country. It is likely the only state that can do the CDC’s job for it and track disease outbreaks outside its borders.
MAHA Trots are not the only problem caused by Trump’s mistreatment of the American administrative state. There is a festering outbreak of worms caused in part by Elon Musk’s destruction of USAID. There is a festering measles outbreak that RFK’s debacled CDC failed to contain, and which he personally caused in part thanks to his decades-long history of spreading anti-vaccination misinformation. Weather forecasts have become noticeably less accurate due to Trump’s budget cuts, which have shut down half of the government’s weather balloons.
Republicans have dreamed of repealing the New Deal since its passage and returning America to an imagined 19th-century utopia with a barely existing federal government. Today we have only a small idea of what this will mean, and the taste smells like parasitic protozoa.