1. United States
2. Ohio
3. Letter

As your constituent, I am writing to urge immediate congressional action to restore the integrity of our national food safety surveillance system. An ongoing, severe parasite outbreak is currently exposing the dangerous cost of a fragmented federal data grid.  In July 2025, the CDC scaled back the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet), removing the mandatory requirement for states to actively track six of eight critical pathogens: Cyclospora, Listeria, Campylobacter, Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia. For thirty years, FoodNet served as the backbone of our food safety early-warning system. Citing internal resource management following sweeping executive personnel and budget cuts across the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency made tracking these dangerous biological threats entirely optional for states.  The direct, predictable consequences of this intentional structural blind spot are playing out right now. A massive outbreak of Cyclospora is tearing across more than 30 states, with cases numbering in the thousands. In the Midwest, state labs are completely overwhelmed, with Michigan alone surging past 1,500 cases, or 3000% above the baseline. Yet, because the uniform federal reporting requirement was dropped last year, public health investigators attempting to trace the contaminated food supply chain are flying blind, forced to work with fragmented, voluntary data pools.  The administration’s public claim that these structural cuts simply "eliminate redundancies" or "return agencies to pre-pandemic baselines" is entirely contradicted by the facts. Office of Personnel Management data shows that recent workforce reductions have driven food safety inspector and scientific staffing levels far below pre-pandemic baselines. Furthermore, the claim that resources are being prioritized for chronic disease is disproven by the simultaneous elimination of 61 chronic disease prevention lines at the CDC. A borderless, multi-billion-dollar national food supply chain cannot be secured by an optional, patchwork state-by-state framework. When federal agencies eliminate mandatory data standards for political and ideological deregulation, it creates an immediate national security vulnerability—allowing pathogens to cross state lines completely undetected, crippling domestic agriculture and threatening public safety. Congress must recognize that public health infrastructure is not a discretionary line item to be quietly hollowed out. Protecting our food supply from biological contamination is a fundamental, non-partisan responsibility of the federal government. I urge you to act immediately on three fronts: 1. Insert an emergency funding rider into the upcoming budget explicitly requiring the CDC to fully restore all eight original pathogens to the FoodNet active surveillance mandate. 2. Tie federal public health laboratory grants to strict, uniform state participation in active pathogen tracking, ensuring no state gaps can compromise national biosecurity or interstate commerce. 3. Launch a congressional oversight investigation into the FDA and CDC's handling of the current Cyclospora outbreak to expose how data fragmentation has paralyzed our ability to quickly trace and remove contaminated produce from grocery shelves. Ignoring acute biological threats does not make them disappear; it only ensures they cost more to contain later. I look forward to your swift leadership on this critical food security issue.