Yesterday I counted twelve letters from members of Congress about this outbreak. It is thirteen. Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on August 13, the same day I published, and her letter is the thirteenth. Five from the House, eight from the Senate. She asks nine questions and wants them answered by August 27.

That is the sixth time this count has moved on me, and it is worth saying plainly that the problem with these letters is not the people writing them. The questions in Warren’s letter are the most specific anybody has asked. Her first question has six subparts and every one of them goes at the July 18 positive test that FDA retracted on July 19. She asks what protocols exist to verify a result before it is released, why FDA reevaluated the finding, whether it reevaluated because Taylor Farms or its representatives asked, whether a political appointee asked, and she demands a transcript of the reported call among the White House, the company and FDA. Nobody else has gone near that sequence in this much detail.

The subpart that matters most is the last one, and it is the only question in thirteen letters that is actually about food safety rather than about politics. If confirmation testing is a standard part of FDA’s procedures, why was the positive communicated to the public before the sample was reevaluated?

Three more of her questions deserve answers whatever anybody thinks of the politics. Her fifth and sixth ask what it costs the department to track, trace and treat cyclosporiasis, broken out for each year from 2016 through 2025, and then what this one has cost. Her seventh asks how many of the states formerly required to report Cyclospora under FoodNet have stopped reporting since July 2025, with a state-by-state breakdown. Every letter since July 14 has asserted that the FoodNet change damaged surveillance, and that question is the one that would prove it or disprove it. She also asks CDC for its own estimate of how many cases have gone unreported, which would be the federal government finally putting a multiplier next to its own count.

Here is the thing about all four of those questions. The answers exist. They are sitting in federal file cabinets and federal spreadsheets right now, and any competent analyst at CDC could produce the FoodNet breakdown in an afternoon. Nothing in Warren’s letter can make anybody walk to the cabinet. Seven dated deadlines across these thirteen letters have now expired and I cannot find a published answer to a single one of them. Senator Ossoff gave the Secretary seventy-two hours, got nothing, and had to spend a second letter saying so. A letter from a member of Congress is a request. It is answered when the agency feels like answering it, and this agency does not feel like it.

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

That brings me to the part I actually want to write about. There is one committee in this fight that can compel an answer, and nobody has asked it to.

Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote to FDA and to Bruce Taylor on July 30 as ranking member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. PSI is the Senate’s standing investigative body, and it has subpoena power. Those two letters ask for every communication between FDA and the White House about this outbreak and about Taylor Farms, and the records definition names Signal and WhatsApp by name. Both letters were copied to Chairman Ron Johnson. Both deadlines were yesterday. Neither has been answered, and a ranking member cannot issue a subpoena alone. That takes the chairman’s signature or a vote of the subcommittee. One person could change the posture of this entire investigation by close of business and has not.

On the House side, Robert Garcia sent Taylor Fresh Foods five categories of documents and five written questions on July 27, including every communication with the White House since January 2025 and every sanitation, audit and contamination record for the plant in Mexico going back to 2013. The deadline was August 10. No production has been reported, and the company is under no obligation, because Garcia is in the minority and a minority document request is a letter with better stationery. The Oversight majority could adopt that same request this morning and it would be answered, because that request would have the committee behind it.

And there is the oldest tool of all, which is a hearing. Put the commissioner and the director under oath, put the company in the room, and ask the questions on the record with a transcript. This is not a novel idea for this parasite. The same Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on Cyclospora in imported produce in July 1998, with CDC scientists and a woman who had been sick testifying about the same problem. Twenty-eight years later, same subcommittee, same parasite, no hearing.

There is also something Congress can do without anybody’s permission, and not one of the thirteen letters asks for it. Warren asks whether the March 2025 delay of the food traceability rule was influenced by a million dollars that went to MAGA Inc. the following week, and by another hundred thousand that went to a second Trump-aligned committee on June 13, 2025, a few weeks before the administration dropped mandatory reporting of Cyclospora and five other pathogens. That is a fair question, and she is careful to frame it as a question. But asking whether the delay was bought is not the same as ending the delay. Section 780 of last November’s appropriations act bars FDA from spending a dime to enforce that rule before July 2028 and instructs the agency to go looking for ways to loosen the lot-level tracking requirement, which is the part of the rule that would actually let anybody follow a case of lettuce backward. Eleven consumer, public health and labor groups wrote to the four congressional leaders on August 12 asking them to rescind it. Thirteen members have written letters about this outbreak and none of them has asked for that. A rider can be undone by the same body that wrote it, and nobody needs the Secretary’s cooperation to do it.

The letters have also turned up facts that then went nowhere, which is its own kind of failure. Warren’s letter reports that CDC cut the staff responsible for tracking and identifying parasites from eleven people to three. It reports that USDA’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center is being closed and relocated, and that two of the laboratories inside it investigate and sequence this parasite. That second one ought to have stopped somebody in their tracks. There is no whole genome sequencing available for Cyclospora, and CDC says so on its own page. When CDC decides that a sick person in Ohio and a sick person in Michigan belong to the same outbreak, it is not matching genomes the way it would for Salmonella or E. coli. It is working from genetic markers, and the methods behind that work come out of a very small number of federal parasitology laboratories. Two of them are being packed into boxes while the largest outbreak of this parasite in American history is still going. That fact appears in one footnote of one letter, and nobody has followed it anywhere.

And then there is the question none of the thirteen has asked at all. Not one of these letters asks how the parasite got onto the lettuce. Nothing about irrigation water. Nothing about the sewage and sanitation failures in the communities around the plant at Doctor Mora. Nothing asking why an industry that tests constantly for indicator organisms does not test for this parasite, or whether a validated test for it on finished product even exists. Nothing about the fourteen states that received the recalled product and have no attributed cases. Nothing asking whether consumers in Mexico, where FDA now confirms the recalled lettuce was sold, were ever told. FDA likely got inspectors inside the plant in Guanajuato on August 13, twenty-seven days after the recall, and not one member of Congress had asked when that was going to happen.

That gap matters more than it looks. Taylor Farms de Mexico is a processing plant. The lettuce arriving at it is grown by other people on other ground, with other water. If this parasite came off that water, then everything Congress is asking about, the phone calls and the donations and the press releases, sits downstream of a problem nobody has put in writing to anybody. The counting problem and the corruption problem are both real. They are also both consequences.

Thirteen letters, thirteen Democrats. Foodborne illness used to be the least partisan subject in Washington. Rosa DeLauro wrote FDA about a Cyclospora outbreak traced to this same part of Mexico in 2013, asking on what legal authority the government could identify a source and decline to name it, and wrote again in 2018 about another one. Nobody at the time thought counting sick people was a party matter. Every tool I have described here belongs to the majority. The chairman’s signature on a PSI subpoena, the Oversight majority adopting Garcia’s request, a hearing date, a vote to strike Section 780. None of it requires a single Democrat.

Thirteen letters in a month. Seven dated deadlines expired. Nine good questions from Senator Warren due back on August 27, which will pass the way the other seven did unless somebody with a gavel decides otherwise. As of last night, the fifty states were reporting 29,912 cases and the two agencies attribute 9,481 of them to this lettuce. Two people are dead. I am watching, and so are twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and twelve other people, and not one of us chose to be part of it.