Farm at Center of Cyclosporiasis Outbreak Went Seven Years Without FDA Inspection

The cyclosporiasis outbreak spreading across the Midwest and Northeast has a paper trail, and it's an ugly one. CBS News reports the FDA last inspected Taylor Farms de Mexico, the farm believed to be the outbreak's source, back in 2019. Before that, the agency's last visit was in 2013, also in response to a cyclosporiasis outbreak.

Seven years between checkups on a farm supplying salad greens to American grocery stores and restaurants.

The Law Congress Wrote and Never Enforced

Federal law requires the FDA to conduct nearly 19,200 foreign food safety inspections annually. In 2025, the agency managed just under 1,000, according to CBS News. That's not close to 10% of the mandate. It's not even close to a lower internal target the FDA itself set as the bare minimum needed to safeguard imports, a number still nearly five times higher than what actually got done.

This isn't new. CBS News notes the FDA has missed this congressional mandate every year for the decade it's been on the books, under Presidents Obama, Trump, Biden, and now Trump again. Democrats and Republicans have both had the chance to fix this. Neither did.

FDA officials have called the inspection quota unrealistic. Maybe it is. But the agency has never formally asked Congress to change the law. It just doesn't hit the number, year after year, and nobody fixes the mismatch between what's required and what's funded.

It Got Worse on Trump's Watch

Give credit where it's due to CBS News for not letting anyone off the hook here. Congress hasn't increased FDA food safety funding to keep pace with inflation. Layoffs during the first year of Trump's second term cut into the agency's already-thin inspection capacity.

The result: foreign food safety inspections fell 29% from 2024 to 2025. Outside of the COVID-19 pandemic, last year's inspection total was the lowest since 2011. Early 2026 numbers suggest the agency is on pace for a similarly weak year, according to CBS News.

Fewer inspectors means fewer inspections, and fewer inspections means more blind spots. When outbreaks like this one hit, that gap becomes someone's hospital bill.

HHS senior press secretary Emily Hilliard told CBS News the FDA is "actively working to expand staffing at foreign posts." No specific numbers, no timeline.

What Inspectors Actually Find

The data on what happens when the FDA does show up should worry anyone who eats salad. About a third of foreign inspections over the last decade turned up violations, according to inspection records cited by CBS News. Past inspectors have found toilet paper and human feces in growing fields in Mexico, and air conditioning units dripping onto crawfish in China.

Around 2% of visits turned up violations serious enough to trigger enforcement action. The 2019 inspection of Taylor Farms de Mexico found no violations. The 2013 inspection, done in response to an earlier cyclosporiasis outbreak, found the facility was recycling wash water for salad mix, though investigators couldn't conclusively tie that practice to the outbreak.

Meridith Seife, who led a Health and Human Services Inspector General report on FDA inspections, put it bluntly to CBS News: "If FDA isn't routinely going out to food facilities, it's just completely blind." An inspection regime that visits a facility once every six or seven years isn't a regime. It's a formality.

The Bigger Picture Getting Lost

Coverage aggregated by KFF Health News adds useful context that puts this outbreak in perspective. Mexico's health ministry said Tuesday that tests at more than a dozen Riviera Maya hotels came back negative for cyclospora, after British health authorities reported cases in travelers who'd stayed there, a separate matter from the U.S. outbreak. California officials also confirmed rising cyclosporiasis cases in that state, but said they're unrelated to the larger Midwest and Northeast outbreak.

None of that changes the core problem. Whether Taylor Farms de Mexico is definitively confirmed as the outbreak source is still an open question. Both CBS News and KFF Health News note it as "believed to be" the source, not a confirmed one. What's not in dispute is the seven-year inspection gap and the FDA's decade-long failure to meet a legal requirement that exists specifically to catch problems like this before Americans get sick.

Congress could raise the FDA's budget to match the mandate it wrote into law. It could also lower the mandate to something achievable and hold the agency to that instead. So far it's done neither, and that inaction is the actual policy on foreign food safety inspections right now.