Trump Administration Halts Federal Cyclospora Research Amid Record Outbreak

The Trump administration is halting vital federal research on the foodborne parasite Cyclospora, despite the record-breaking, nationwide outbreak of the diarrheal pathogen, according to Politico.

Of the three research programs that represent nearly all of the Cyclospora work at the US Department of Agriculture, two have been defunded, and the third is about to lose every scientist working on it. The Trump administration is shuttering the USDA’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center near Washington, DC, and moving its work to a location in Iowa. That includes relocating the remaining Cyclospora research.

Although the research is still funded, insiders told Politico that not one of the scientists working on the project plans to relocate from Maryland to Iowa. Instead, they are either retiring, being reassigned to a different project, or leaving the USDA’s research services.

“They will have no parasitologists,” one USDA employee told Politico. “There will be a big knowledge gap.”

The US is experiencing the largest Cyclospora outbreak ever recorded. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tallied nearly 30,000 confirmed and probable cases this summer. At least 922 people have been hospitalized with cyclosporiasis, and two have died. Since 2018, the US has generally reported between 2,000 and 5,000 cases, though the US reported 1,180 cases in 2025.

Lost research opportunities

Cyclospora is difficult to work with in a laboratory compared to other foodborne pathogens, such as E. coli or Salmonella. Cyclospora grow and reproduce only in the human gut, not in lab conditions. Although the parasite can be isolated from feces in labs, it can sometimes be difficult to fish out; it can be shed intermittently or at low levels, requiring repeat fecal samples from an infected person. The parasite is also harder to study using genetic techniques. It has a much larger genome than bacteria, making genomic sequencing costlier and more laborious. It also reproduces sexually, meaning each generation will have new mixes of genes, making it harder to trace back lineages of the parasite to a single contaminated food. That’s in contrast to bacteria, which reproduce asexually, creating clones that are often nearly identical and easy to trace.

With this year’s outbreak, researchers hoped for a surge in understanding of the parasite. “We see this as an enormous opportunity, this current outbreak, to have really a lot of samples that could help us understand these outbreaks better,” another USDA employee told Politico. However, people who worked on the defunded Cyclospora programs are barred from doing any more research and are simply preserving samples they already had from previous outbreaks.

While funding may be restored at a later time, experts said the disruption to the research will be difficult to overcome. “The bigger impact is that there are very few people in the world that study these [parasites],” Joelle Mosso, associate vice president for science growers at the Western Growers Association, a trade group representing produce farmers, told Politico. “It’s not just replacing the lab. It takes decades to build expertise.”