Helena Bottemiller Evich’s Friday edition of Food Fix made an argument I have been making in pieces all summer, and she made it in one clean sweep: Congress has stopped doing its job. When she had me on her American Dish podcast on Sept. 2 to talk about the Cyclospora outbreak, I said much the same thing: the blame for our food safety troubles rests less with any one administration than with Congress’s decades-long unwillingness to stay on top of food safety policy and to pay for it. She called what we are watching “the slow rot of what was supposed to be our most important branch.” I agree. After more than thirty years of watching Congress respond, or fail to respond, to outbreaks, I want to add what that rot looks like from where I sit.

A 12-to-11 farm bill

On Wednesday the Senate Agriculture Committee advanced the farm bill 12 to 11 on a party-line vote, and it took the return of Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, back after more than three months away following a fall, to get there. Most of the coverage focused on McConnell. Helena focused on the more important point: that his vote was needed at all.

The contrast with 2018 is stark. That year the Senate committee cleared its farm bill 20 to 1, and the full Senate passed it 86 to 11, the most votes a Senate farm bill had ever received. The farm bill is supposed to be rewritten every five years. The 2018 law expired in 2023 and has been kept alive by extensions ever since, and the current extension runs out Sept. 30. Child nutrition programs, which cover school meals, have not had a full reauthorization since the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.

The largest outbreak in three decades, and no hearing

This summer’s Cyclospora outbreak is the one I know best. As of Sept. 15, CDC counted 19,883 lab-confirmed, domestically acquired cases with onsets from May 1 through Aug. 31, including 1,064 hospitalizations and two deaths, in 49 states and the District of Columbia. CDC says it is aware of more than 36,000 cases in all. The same months in 2025 produced 1,180. When CDC declared the outbreak over on Sept. 11, it tied 12,883 illnesses to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico, which leaves exactly 7,000 confirmed cases with no food named.

Members of Congress noticed. Thirteen letters had gone to FDA, CDC, HHS and Taylor Farms by the end of August. Rep. Debbie Dingell and nine House colleagues sent a fourteenth, to USDA, on Sept. 14. On Sept. 17, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and 23 other members sent a fifteenth, the first from both chambers, asking USDA to stop closing the Beltsville lab where its Cyclospora research is done. Eight of the fifteen set dated deadlines, and all eight passed without a published answer, as I wrote this week. No committee has held a hearing.

There is a structural reason for that, and it is not a partisan complaint. Every one of those letters came from members of the minority party; the newest carries 25 signatures, and none of them belongs to someone who holds a gavel. A member in the minority can write a letter. Only the majority, through its committee chairs, can call a hearing, issue a subpoena and put a witness under oath. When the gavel stays on the table, the letters are all there is, and agencies and companies have learned that letters can go unanswered.

Fifty-two babies, and no oversight hearing

Helena also pointed to the infant formula botulism outbreaks. By CDC’s count, 48 infants in 17 states were hospitalized in the ByHeart outbreak, the largest infant botulism outbreak in American history, and four more in the Nara Organics outbreak. That is 52 babies. I represent families in both. In late August, whole genome sequencing linked the two outbreaks through a shared dairy ingredient. There has not been a single oversight hearing on either one.

Compare 2022. When the Abbott plant in Sturgis, Michigan, shut down and the formula shortage hit, the House Energy and Commerce oversight subcommittee brought formula company executives in to testify in May, and the FDA commissioner went before the Senate HELP Committee the next day. Compare 2009, when the same House oversight panel called Peanut Corporation of America’s Stewart Parnell to testify within weeks of the recall, and he took the Fifth. Compare July 1998, when the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on Cyclospora in imported raspberries. That was Congress doing its job.

There is a bill. H.R. 7867 would put C. botulinum on the list of organisms formula makers must test for. The House Health Subcommittee held a legislative hearing on it April 29, and it has waited since for a markup nobody has scheduled. I have written Energy and Commerce and Senate HELP twice each, in June and again in August, and none of the four letters has drawn a reply. HELP Chairman Bill Cassidy did demand answers from Nara and ByHeart, and he deserves credit for it, but a letter is not a markup. This week t-shirts are being hand-delivered to all 77 members of those two committees. I have also turned to a citizen petition asking FDA to require the testing by regulation, with 24 parents of hospitalized infants as co-petitioners. When Congress will not act, the agencies are the only door left open.

When Congress does act, it acts quietly

The most consequential thing Congress did on food safety in the past year it did by rider. Section 780 of the continuing resolution that ended last fall’s shutdown, P.L. 119-37, bars FDA from spending money to administer or enforce the food traceability rule before July 20, 2028. That is the rule built to speed tracing of high-risk foods, leafy greens among them. The Senate Appropriations Committee had written the opposite, language telling FDA not to delay enforcement past July 2028. The House version won. There was no hearing on that choice either, and the lobbying behind it became public only because the Guardian went and read the disclosure filings.

The agencies are paying for it, too

Helena’s reading list makes the rest of the case. STAT reports that the FDA is trying to hire more than 2,000 people after losing about 3,500 in the April 2025 cuts, and that the hiring is stuck in the same administrative bottlenecks the cuts created. Civil Eats reports a GAO finding that the government spent about $9.5 billion in 2025 paying employees on administrative leave, most of it through the deferred resignation program, and that USDA cut about 20 percent of its staff and HHS about 18 percent. Whatever anyone thinks of those decisions, this is exactly what oversight hearings exist for: asking whether the agencies that inspect our food have the people to do it.

What would help

I have no interest in stirring the political pot, and Helena was careful to say the decline has held no matter which party is in power. The fixes are not partisan either.

First, hold the hearings. The House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Senate HELP Committee and the agriculture appropriations subcommittees in both chambers have jurisdiction over this summer’s outbreak and the formula outbreaks. Call CDC, FDA and the companies. Ask where the other 7,000 Cyclospora cases came from, why fifteen letters have no published answer, and why powdered infant formula is still not tested for C. botulinum. If witnesses will not come, subpoena them.

Second, do the routine work. Pass a farm bill instead of a fourth extension. Reauthorize child nutrition programs for the first time since 2010. Fund the FDA on time, so the agency is not planning around the next shutdown.

Third, give the next Congress a to-do list it can act on. I have been circulating a food safety agenda, Project 2027, among consumer and public health groups for comment, and a signed version goes to the new Congress in January. It names specific problems and specific fixes.

Helena asked what disaster it would take to get Congress’s attention. More than 36,000 Cyclospora cases, fifteen letters without a published answer and 52 babies hospitalized with botulism should have been enough. If they were not, the problem is not the size of the disaster. It is an institution that has forgotten one of its core jobs, and the rest of us need to remind it.