Publisher’s Platform: Thirteen letters to FDA, CDC, HHS and Taylor Farms, and not one published answer

Between July 14 and Aug. 13, members of the House and Senate sent 13 separate letters about the 2026 Cyclospora outbreak. Five came out of the House and eight out of the Senate. They went to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to the acting heads of FDA and CDC, and twice to the chief executive of Taylor Farms. Seven of them set a deadline that has now passed. One deadline is still live, and it falls this Thursday. As of Aug. 23 I could not find a published answer to a single one of the 13.

What has changed since I last wrote about this is not that anybody answered. It is that the answers started showing up somewhere else.

Start with the credit, because it is owed
A letter from a member of Congress is not a subpoena and it is not a rule. I have spent 33 years watching letters like these go into a drawer. But a letter puts a specific question in writing with a name underneath it, and it creates a date on which somebody either answered or did not. Every one of these members chose to spend staff time and political attention on a parasite most of the country had never heard of in May. The questions in them are the most specific anyone has asked about this outbreak, and several of them surfaced facts that would otherwise still be buried — the parasitology bench at CDC cut from 11 people to three, the food safety laboratory network down from 41 active labs to 15, the USDA research center that does much of the country’s Cyclospora genotyping being closed and relocated.

Here is the whole list. The column on the right is the one to read.

I believe that is every letter, but I am not certain it is. I built the list from press releases, from posted PDFs, and from reporting where offices posted nothing. A letter sent quietly without a release is one I would not have seen — I have had to add one four separate times already. The status column says no answer found, which means exactly that and nothing more. An agency can answer a member privately and often does, and neither side has to publish it. If you have an answer to any of these, send it to me and I will correct this post and say plainly that I had it wrong. That is the list I would like to see grow.

The answers exist. They are being given to reporters instead.

On the day Senator Warren’s letter went out, HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard told The Hill that the agencies’ response has been guided by scientific and public health evidence, that the FDA investigators responsible for outbreak investigations were not affected by staffing changes or reductions in force, and that political contributions or relationships have no bearing on FDA or CDC outbreak investigations. That is a direct answer to the central allegation in at least four of the 13 letters. It was given to a media outlet.

Taylor Farms did the same thing. The company told Scripps News that it acts in the interest of science and consumer health rather than politics, and that it categorically rejects any suggestion that it sought or received favorable regulatory treatment through political contributions or improper influence. That is a direct answer to Rep. Garcia and to Sen. Blumenthal. It was given to a television network.

And then there is the FAQ page, which is the part that should decide this

Go to the company’s own Cyclospora information hub and scroll to the questions. One of them asks whether Taylor Farms used political connections or contributions to influence the FDA investigation, and answers no. Another lays out a day-by-day account of July 15 through July 19 — the date FDA and CDC first shared traceback data, the call on which the company says it raised scientific questions about the government’s assumptions and methodology, and then July 16, when those questions were discussed further with government counsel and officials including career staff, lawyers, and officials from FDA, HHS and the White House. The company states that it decided to recall that same day.

Read that against the letters. Rep. Garcia asked for every communication with the White House since January 2025. Sen.Blumenthal asked FDA and the company, separately, for all communications with the Executive Office of the President and the Domestic Policy Council, in a records definition that named Signal and WhatsApp. Sen. Warren asked for a transcript of the reported call. None of them has received anything. And a version of the answer — the company’s version, unsworn, undated as to who said what, and written by the party with the most at stake — has been sitting on a corporate FAQ page, revised at least five times, overwritten in place, with no version history and no correction notes.

I am not saying the company did anything improper by putting it there. I would rather have it than not have it. I am saying that this is what the record looks like when nobody with subpoena power has asked for it: the regulated party gets to write the first draft of history on its own website, and Congress reads it there like everybody else.

A statement to a reporter is not an answer to a letter, and the difference is the whole point

A press statement is not made under oath. It is not a document production. It can be revised or deleted without anyone being told, which has already happened repeatedly on this outbreak, on both the government’s pages and the company’s. It does not tell Sen. Warren how many states stopped reporting cyclosporiasis after the surveillance change in July 2025, state by state, which is the single most useful question in all 13 letters. It does not tell Rep. Garcia what the facility records at the Taylor Farms facility in Doctor Mora, Mexico, show going back to 2013. It does not produce the call.

Those things exist. They are in federal file cabinets and on company servers right now. Nothing in a letter can make anybody walk to one.

What would actually work, and every bit of it belongs to the majority

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations can issue a subpoena. Sen. Blumenthal wrote as its ranking member and copied Chairman Ron Johnson on both July 30 letters; a ranking member cannot subpoena alone and a chairman can. The House Oversight majority could adopt Rep. Garcia’s document request tomorrow and it would carry the committee’s weight instead of the minority’s. The Senate HELP Committee has jurisdiction over both agencies, and so does the Appropriations subcommittee that funds FDA, where Sen. Ossoff already sits and where the Senate wrote language, in its own report, directing that enforcement of the traceability rule is not delayed past 2028 — language that did not survive.

And there is precedent that is almost eerie. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on Cyclospora in imported raspberries in July 1998. Same subcommittee, same parasite, imported produce, twenty-eight years ago. Rep. Rosa DeLauro wrote FDA and CDC during the 2013 outbreak traced to this same Guanajuato facility, and again in 2018 about Fresh Express. The questions do not change. What changes is whether anyone is ever made to answer them out loud.

A hearing does three things a letter cannot. It puts a human being in a chair on a certain date. It puts them under oath, so the answer costs something if it is wrong. And it creates a public transcript that cannot be revised in place at two in the morning the way a webpage can. That last one matters more in this outbreak than in any I have worked on, because nearly every primary document in it — FDA’s advisory, CDC’s outbreak pages, the company’s statement — has been rewritten on the same URL with no record of what it used to say.

Thursday is the last date on the board

Sen. Warren’s nine questions are due Aug. 27. After that there is no outstanding deadline in front of any agency or any company on this outbreak, and the Cyclospora season closes on Aug. 31. FDA counts 10,930 illnesses, 454 hospitalizations and two deaths in the outbreak it attributes to Taylor Farms. CDC counts 15,716 laboratory-confirmed illnesses nationally since May 1 and at least 828 hospitalizations, against 1,180 cases in the same stretch of 2025. Adding up what the fifty states publish about themselves, my own count is 32,135 people this morning, and it is a floor rather than an estimate.

Thirteen letters produced a great deal of good work and no answers. I wrote in an earlier version of this list that the questions were good questions and the problem was that nobody had reached for the one thing that would make anybody answer them. A month later that is still true, and the calendar has nearly run out. Hold a hearing. Put the acting commissioner, the acting director and Bruce Taylor at the same table, under oath, and ask them the questions that are already written down. Thirteen members have done the drafting. Somebody with a gavel has to do the rest — the same somebody who could also strike the provision that pushed the traceability rule to 2028 and made this outbreak so much harder to trace in the first place.