While I was on a plane heading back from Norway, on Friday evening Lena H. Sun of the Washington Post reported that FDA had closed its investigation of the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history: the parasite was in wastewater leaving the Taylor Farms de Mexico plant and in a ditch at a grower that supplied it, and the agency could not say how it got onto the lettuce. Sun also reported two things the notice does not: FDA did not say when the samples were taken, and by the Post’s own analysis of FDA enforcement data, at least 3.1 million pounds of lettuce tied to the operation were recalled, against the previous record for a Cyclosporarecall, about 31,000 pounds of parsley in September 2025. A hundred times the old record, and it took a newspaper to add it up.

That has been the shape of this outbreak since July. The agencies published on a schedule. Sun published when she knew.

The ledger

July 10. Sun asked why nobody could say what food was spreading the parasite. I answered two days later that you cannot trace what you do not count: the official count was 843, and Michigan alone had more than 1,500.

July 14. Sun reported, from two people familiar with the investigation, that investigators were looking at Taco Bell and lettuce. CDC said that day it had found a likely link among cases in four states, and did not say where the people had eaten. The agencies said Taco Bell on July 16.

July 16. The night the agencies said Taco Bell and a single supplier of iceberg lettuce from Mexico, Sun and Rachel Roubein named the supplier: Taylor Farms. FDA’s page named the company on July 17. I wrote that day that the outbreak now had two names on it.

July 24. At five in the morning, Sun reported that CDC had tied four more states to the outbreak. CDC’s investigation page still said five, stamped July 16, and Reuters, picking up her story, could not reach CDC outside business hours. I asked that morning whether the Post was the new CDC. FDA’s advisory caught up later that day.

August 4. At 4:13 in the afternoon the Post named the six states that took the outbreak from nine to fifteen, from a fourth person familiar with the investigation. Every federal page said nine. FDA’s advisory, still titled for a nine-state outbreak, changed on August 5.

August 14. Roubein, Sun and Caitlin Gilbert reported, from four people with knowledge of the matter, that FDA investigators had reached the Taylor Farms plant that week, a month after the agency named the company. The interval was the headline, I borrowed it, and the explanation came from Donald Prater, FDA’s acting deputy commissioner for food, in an interview with the Post.

September 11. Roubein reported, from two people familiar with the matter, that federal officials were about to declare the outbreak over. They did later that day. I learned it from the Post.

What the attributions tell you

Count them. Two individuals familiar with the investigation. A fourth person familiar. Four people with knowledge of the matter. Two people familiar with the matter. They are people inside the investigation telling a reporter what their own agencies’ pages would not say for another day, or another twelve. The information existed every time; it reached the public through a paywall because the federal pages were waiting on a schedule. The reporting is not the problem. Sun and Roubein have been right every time I could check, which is every time.

Congress reads her too. Senator Warren’s August 13 letter to Secretary Kennedy footnotes two of Sun’s stories. Fifteen letters from members of Congress have gone to FDA, CDC, HHS, USDA and Taylor Farms since July. Not one has a published answer, and no committee has noticed a hearing.

The next story is on Capitol Hill

FDA closed its file on Friday and put ten commitments in writing for the 2027 growing season. That is the agencies’ chapter. Congress has not written its own, and the next central Mexico growing season begins this fall. Sun’s next story is in the Agriculture-FDA appropriations subcommittees, the HELP Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Here are the problems and the fixes, as I set them out Saturday on Food Safety News, each with a question.

The traceability rule. The administration pushed compliance from January 2026 to July 2028, and in November 2025 Congress barred FDA from spending a dollar to enforce it before then. Michigan asked Taco Bell three times over six days for a supplier list the rule would have required in a day; FDA had complete records on July 13, and the lettuce shipped through July 16. The fix is to repeal the rider, as eleven consumer and food safety organizations asked in August. The delay was requested by retail, grocery, restaurant and distribution associations, whose own lobbying filings say so. The question: the Senate Appropriations Committee’s report said FDA could not delay past July 2028; the enacted bill says FDA cannot enforce before it. Who put Section 780 in, and why has no senator on that subcommittee asked?

Counting. On July 1, 2025, CDC cut FoodNet from eight pathogens to two, and Cyclospora was dropped. CDC counted 19,883 confirmed cases this season, roughly 7,000 of them never tied to any food. The nominee to run CDC, asked in July whether she would restore the reporting, would not commit. The fix: FoodNet back to eight pathogens, one national number, the illness reportable in every state, and the parasite on the national wastewater panel. The question: what did dropping six pathogens save, and who signed it?

The states. In March 2025 HHS clawed back $11.4 billion from state and local health departments, $8.9 billion of it epidemiology and laboratory money. A court restored it only for the twenty-three states and the District that sued. Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia, three of the five original outbreak states, were not among them. The fix is to fund the grants for all fifty; the question is how Ohio counted its share of this outbreak on what was left.

The science. Congress declined to fund two of the three Cyclospora projects at USDA’s Beltsville research center for fiscal 2026, and the parasitologists there were told to relocate or lose their jobs. Kalmia Kniel at the University of Delaware asked USDA four years running for about $10 million to build a water test for this parasite and was turned down. USDA ended the advisory committee that wrote the government’s 2023 report on this parasite, saving $225,000. The fix: fund Beltsville and the Delaware test, rehire the parasitologists, bring the committee back.

The testing program. USDA’s Microbiological Data Program tested about 15,000 produce samples a year for $4.5 million until it was zeroed out in 2012 at the produce industry’s urging. USDA’s own economists price this parasite at $5.3 million a year. The fix is to restore it with the parasite on the panel; it costs less than the disease.

Inspections. Congress set a goal of 19,200 foreign food inspections a year by 2016. In 2025 FDA made about 1,100. Before this summer it had not visited the Guanajuato plant since 2019, and it laid off the staff who plan foreign inspection travel before reinstating them in August after the New York Times asked. The fix: inspect foreign plants on a schedule and fund the inspectors. Susan Mayne, who directed FDA’s food safety center, gave Sun three more on Friday: research on treating agricultural water, a produce safety expert stationed in Mexico, and testing of lettuce before it crosses the border next summer.

Transparency. A petition from STOP Foodborne Illness asking FDA to name every firm in an outbreak has sat at the agency since February; the growers in this one are still unnamed. The genotype comparison between the water and the patients is pending, and Representative Garcia’s July 27 request for Taylor Farms’ records back to 2013 has no public answer. The fix: grant the petition, publish the investigation report and the genotype comparison with a date, and name Cyclospora in the agricultural water rule, whose only numeric standard is for E. coli, a test that cannot find a parasite.

The hearing. The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on this parasite in 1998, and its chairman can issue a subpoena. The Secretary said the outbreak was under control on July 21, when the count was 1,644. For the fifteen offices that wrote, the question is what they have gotten back. For the committees with gavels, it is why the only hearing room this outbreak reached was a confirmation hearing.

Sun has spent a summer telling the public what the government knew before it said so. The sequel is what Congress does about it, and it has a calendar. I asked the beef industry to put me out of business in 2002, and it largely did; I have been asking the lettuce business for nearly thirty years. Ask the appropriators, ask the members who signed the letters, ask the ones who did not, and print the answers next to the dates. The next crop goes in the ground this fall.