By admin 
As head of the federal lab responsible for identifying parasitic outbreaks throughout the nation, Dr. Joel Barratt watched with alarm as Trump administration cuts and hiring freezes last year slowly depleted his staff.
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By the time his 11-person team was reduced to three in September, Barratt said he had enough and resigned. But before leaving, he said, he sent emails to higher-ups at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the risks of losing staff and how it could hurt the response to future outbreaks.
And now, those warnings have become reality, with the employees working to rein in a growing cyclospora outbreak in the Midwest, forced to do more with less.
“The response is being hampered by the loss of specialized staff and the loss of hands-on-deck needed to identify the source of the outbreaks,” he said.
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The government’s reaction to the cyclospora outbreak has been undermined by massive budget and staffing cuts under President Donald Trump, CNN has found – including nearly $30 million in funding that disappeared from Barratt’s CDC division when Trump axed the US Agency for International Development.
While Trump justified cuts to USAID by portraying it as a wasteful agency helping foreign nations, millions of dollars that it spent on global malaria prevention also indirectly benefited cyclospora work in the United States, former CDC officials said.
“The referenced USAID funds that were administered by the CDC supported overseas programs, not domestic disease response,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement to CNN. “The Trump administration’s top priority is ensuring the health and safety of the American people.”
But sources told CNN it’s not that simple, since some of the money paid for shared lab equipment that also benefited cyclospora research and staff that could be tapped for help in outbreaks.
The domino effect of that lost funding is still being felt in the lagging cyclospora response today. Public health experts told CNN that warnings to doctors and efforts to home in on a specific source, among other actions, have taken much longer than they should have. Several state health departments also said federal budget cuts and the threat of even more have made it harder for them to do their jobs.
Cyclospora cases typically increase in summer, but many states are seeing elevated levels. Nationally, more than 7,000 cases of the parasite have been confirmed or are under investigation, according to the CDC, which said there have been more than 100 hospitalizations but no deaths to date. Many cases are part of the outbreak in the Midwest, which could be the largest cyclospora outbreak on record if all tied to the same source, while others are part of separate investigations.
Infected people may have symptoms including watery diarrhea, cramping and bloating for weeks, and because symptoms can take a week or longer to show up after exposure, zeroing in on the culprit can be difficult.
Federal officials announced Thursday that they believed the outbreak in several Midwestern states was linked to shredded iceberg lettuce served by Taco Bell restaurants. The company said it has removed the compromised lettuce from its supply chain. Supplier Taylor Farms de Mexico has recalled iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico from the US market.
The US Department of Health and Human Services previously told CNN that it is working with federal and state partners to monitor cyclospora case counts and cluster activity. An official also noted at a briefing last week that testing has taken longer because the genome of cyclospora is more complicated than that of other parasites.
The White House said in a statement that cyclospora has posed a “unique challenge for contact tracers” and that “the reality is that the Trump administration has been aggressively coordinating response efforts to trace and contain Cyclospora.”
HHS did not comment on whether the loss of funding and personnel has slowed its response.
“[It] causes a lot of challenges to do an investigation when you’ve lost your people, you’ve lost a lot of your funding, you’re operating in uncertainty,” said a source familiar with the CDC’s outbreak investigation who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of their information. “It’s the perfect storm.”
Iceberg lettuce recalled in 27 states due to potential cyclospora contamination
‘Knowledge is lost’
The Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria, which Barratt’s team was a part of, was funded largely by USAID, with smaller buckets of funding coming from the CDC. Most of the division was focused on combating malaria abroad through a decades-old program called the President’s Malaria Initiative, which was not only funded by USAID but partially run by the agency. When Trump took office and dismantled USAID, the division was gutted and left with a $29 million hole to plug.
At the same time, the Trump administration’s budget tightening meant Barratt’s team couldn’t renew contracts for employees – many of whom were employed under a fellowship program called Title 42, which allowed the CDC to hire highly skilled scientists from other countries. The White House said these were not part of the administration’s “reduction in force” initiatives. Nonetheless, Barratt’s already-small team shrank from 11 to three, and funding for their work, which was being shared across the division, dried up.
“This is a group that was underfunded historically. A significant amount of their budget was coming from USAID, and when those funds were at risk or didn’t come, we had to make decisions,” said Dr. Dan Jernigan, who was the director of the CDC’s Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease division until August, when he resigned over ethical and scientific concerns with the administration.
Typically, during outbreaks like this one, CDC staffers from throughout the agency with different expertise would have been pulled in to help during the surge.
“The cyclospora experts at CDC are few in numbers,” Jernigan said. “When you have a big outbreak, you have to pull in people. And the people that would have been pulled in were others in the parasitic division, like those working on malaria and neglected tropical diseases.”
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Many of those staffers are now gone, as the CDC lost roughly one-quarter of its employees in 2025 through reduction-in-force cuts ordered by the Trump administration.
The White House spokesperson said the President’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget “actually proposes a $33 million increase for food safety activities to strengthen the CDC’s domestic capabilities.” But when it comes to the current outbreak, experts told CNN, the damage has already been done.
Fewer staff has meant all facets of the outbreak investigation have been slowed — from simple data entry to complex laboratory analysis of genetic information.
The division charged with keeping a handle on parasitic diseases had already been small, with only a few employees designated to parasite work. Now, many of them are gone.
“The people who’ve led this work last year and maybe the 10 or 20 years before that no longer work at the agency,” the source said. “A lot of that knowledge is lost, and some people are doing this for the very first time in their careers.”
As a result, the CDC’s accounting of the scope of the crisis has lagged behind the numbers reported by states. Michigan alone has reported more than 5,000 cases, while the CDC has verified only 1,645 domestic cases. It’s the kind of reporting delay the CDC hasn’t seen in 15 years, the source said.
Achyut KC, a medical epidemiologist who left the CDC in 2022, said that when he was at the agency, it would mobilize quickly to address problems. The agency’s response to this crisis, he said, seems to be lacking that sort of response.
“I don’t perceive that same level of urgency,” he said. “I can’t say whether that reflects organizational restructuring, reduced resources, different operational decisions or simply a different assessment of this outbreak. … What I can say is that the contrast with my own experience at CDC is noticeable.”
Other experts who’ve followed the CDC’s work for years agree.
“This outbreak deserves a hot wash, or a major review, because there were so many things we could learn from this that went wrong,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Although the first illnesses began in mid-May, the CDC didn’t notify the public or healthcare providers about the outbreak until July 14. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services warned the public of the outbreak two weeks earlier.
Osterholm said the slow federal response made the outbreak concentrated in the Midwest seem like it was more widespread, affecting people across the country. Many people followed recommendations from the state of Michigan not to eat salad greens when they likely didn’t need to.
“Most of the country is not at risk, and they never were,” Osterholm said.
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The CDC has recently taken steps to speed up data collection, adding cyclosporiasis to an electronic reporting system it shares with state health departments that helps the agency sort through large amounts of data quickly to link cases and define outbreaks.
But even use of that system is being hampered because state officials haven’t been trained in how to enter cyclosporiasis cases yet. Such trainings, sources said, used to be done at workshops and scientific conferences, something the Trump administration has limited.
‘It’s a lot’
Barratt, the former lab director who resigned last year, said it has been discouraging to watch the outbreak unfold in the way it has, knowing how hard his former colleagues must be working right now.
He led the team responsible for sequencing the DNA of cyclospora and malaria, meaning that during cyclospora outbreaks, his team tested stool specimens to compare the parasite DNA and identify people who were most likely part of the same outbreak. This allowed the federal government to more easily zero in on a common culprit that had been consumed, which in turn helped identify the source of an outbreak, such as a specific farm, ranch or distributor.
“It’s a lot,” said Barratt, who is now an associate professor at the Emory University School of Medicine. “And it was a lot to do even prior to the reductions.”
Barratt said the current level of cyclosporiasis cases is not unexpected given the trend of rising cases each summer for the past couple decades, so it’s not fair to pin the current outbreak on funding cuts. What is different, he said, is the CDC’s response.
“What has changed is our – the US’s – ability to respond to these outbreaks,” he said. “The reduction in staff has hampered the process.”
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