Growing up as a farmer's daughter in Buhl, Idaho, I learned early that food security is not just a slogan—it's a matter of national security and public health. My father, Thomas, who led the Potato Growers of Idaho, instilled in me the importance of trust in our food system. Now, as a freshman member of Congress on the House Agriculture Committee, I am alarmed at how quickly the agencies responsible for our food safety have been hollowed out. When parents worry about the safety of the food they feed their children, we have reached a breaking point.
This summer, nearly 11,000 Americans were sickened by an outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce. Of those, 454 were hospitalized across 17 states, and two died. The first illness occurred on June 22, yet the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did not send an inspector to the Mexican facility that grew the lettuce until August 13—52 days later. That was the agency's first visit to the facility since 2019. In 2013, inspectors had found the plant recycling its wash water during an earlier cyclosporiasis outbreak.
The lettuce was imported, as were the jalapeños behind a separate August salmonella outbreak that sickened 431 people in 32 states. Yet last month, President Trump announced we would accept up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef over 90 days, free of the tariff that normally applies once import quotas are full. No supplying country has been named, no order has been issued, and no one has said who will inspect it.
These issues hit close to home. The recalled lettuce was distributed in my district here in Maryland, even as it sickened people elsewhere. My district spans from farms to suburbs, with older communities where a listeria or salmonella infection means a hospitalization, not an inconvenience. It also affects the farmers I've met, who meet every standard we set, only to watch imported produce arrive under a looser inspection regimen than their own crops.
Those farmers are squeezed from both directions. The Agricultural Research Service has been cut back, and the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in my state is slated for decommissioning, even though its scientists study the pathogens that end up in these outbreaks. On the Agriculture Committee, I have been fighting to protect that funding. You cannot cut science funding and then act surprised when nobody can say where the lettuce came from.
Meanwhile, farm bankruptcies are up 46 percent. If we want food we can trust, we must fund the science, staff the inspections, and buy from the people growing it down the road.
This administration cannot tell us why these outbreaks happen or, in many cases, where they came from. Six cyclospora clusters are under investigation with no food source identified. An infant botulism outbreak last November tied to powdered formula went unidentified for 23 months, by which time 48 babies had been hospitalized. Of 28 foodborne outbreaks investigated last year, only 11 ended in a recall.
There is no clear plan to prevent the next outbreak, and none to tell families how to protect themselves. That second failure was no accident. The former director of the FDA's food safety center says the teams that ran public awareness campaigns and coordinated crises abroad were eliminated in last year's cuts. When an outbreak arrives, the people whose job was to warn Americans are no longer there.
This blindness has a cause. It was chosen. The law requires the FDA to conduct roughly 19,200 foreign food inspections a year. From 2018 to 2023, it averaged fewer than 1,000 per year. There were only 20 inspectors assigned abroad as of July 2024. The Agriculture Department's inspection service lost 8 percent of its workforce in early 2025, and the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost more than 7,000 people between them. Last August, the CDC cut its FoodNet surveillance from eight pathogens to two. One state official put it plainly: it is like owning a house and taking out the smoke detectors.
The tool that would have shortened these investigations exists, but it was taken away. Congress wrote a traceability rule, effective in January, requiring companies to produce tracing records within 24 hours, so investigators could find contaminated lots in days instead of months. Then this year's appropriations bill barred the FDA from enforcing the rule until 2028—a 30-month delay written into law amid the worst outbreak summer in years. Eleven food safety organizations are asking Congress to reverse it, and I intend to lead that fight.
The remedy is not complicated. Restore the traceability rule, fund foreign inspections toward what the law already requires, and protect the research that makes both possible. The rest is will. A family in a grocery aisle cannot inspect a bag of lettuce. They rely on a system, and this summer that system took 52 days to send someone to look. My father spent his life growing food he trusted his neighbors to eat, and he would not recognize a government this careless with that trust. Food security is national security. It is time we started treating it that way.
