When Robert F. Kennedy Jr tells us he has anything “under control,” panic may be the only logical response.

The health secretary has long seemed unable to control even his own impulses, let alone the massive government apparatus under his and his relationship with the truth has been strained, to put it politely, for decades.

On Tuesday, Kennedy assured the nation that the Department of Health and Human Services has record-breaking outbreak of cyclosporiasis infections – that explosive diarrhea illness – “under control.” Exactly what he meant was unclear, since the number of cases recorded by authorities across six affected states are continuing to rise rapidly.

Rather than clarify this dire situation, Kennedy’s remarks only further muddied contradictory reports from the agencies under his control.

“We have the outbreak under control,” Kennedy said at a press briefing on Tuesday. “We have done extensive forensics, epidemiological forensics, and we’ve identified the source of the outbreak. And the companies that are involved have all implemented a recall.” Yet despite his frequent promises of transparency, he failed to identify those companies and did nothing to explain why the FDA had named the outbreak's source as tainted lettuce from Taylor Farms in Mexico, only to withdraw that "false positive" identification hours later.

Still more confusing was the FDA's subsequent social media statement: “To clarify, this false-positive lab sample DOES NOT change the basis for FDA’s ongoing outbreak investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall by Taylor Farms.”

Only someone with a truly twisted sense of humor could begin that tweet with the phrase "to clarify."

So despite Kennedy's claim that the government has found the source of the outbreak, it should be obvious that neither he nor his subordinates have any idea where the cyclospora entered our food supply, or even whether there is a single source.

But we can name the probable cause of this scourge, just as we could have predicted it more than a year ago, as many did. The United State has become vulnerable to worsening outbreaks of communicable disease, including parasites like cyclospora and viruses like measles, because Kennedy, his boss Donald Trump. and former Trump "co-president" Elon Musk have dismantled and defunded the government structures built to protect us.

"Structures" may be too abstract a term to describe what this trio of vandals has wrecked -- an enormous and delicate complex of scientists, support workers, laboratories, testing, surveillance, and communications protocols required to detect disease outbreaks as early as possible and suppress or at least control them before they wreak havoc. Most of the time, as Ryan Cooper observed in The American Prospect, we had no idea how this vital public service operated because everyone involved was doing their job successfully. When it worked, nobody noticed.

Over the months since Trump returned to the Oval Office, however, we have seen how quickly that protective shield could be compromised. Musk's misnamed Department of Government Efficiency dismissed thousands of essential employees in Kennedy's HHS, without so much as a peep from their putative leader, whose promise to "make America healthy again" turned out to be the sickest of jokes. Among the many functions "decommissioned" in this supposed drive for efficiency was the FDA's Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory, which conducted food safety testing. ”

That left the FDA "no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis,” according to an internal agency email obtained by Reuters. It is hard not to wonder how Kennedy would have any idea where a parasitic outbreak began when the relevant labs were shut down months ago.

We know exactly what Kennedy and his fellow idiots have inflicted on our public health infrastructures. As of last winter, the USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service had lost nearly 1000 staff, with another 19,000 dismissed from USDA over the past year. As The American Prospect reported:

The Centers for Disease Control, whose primary task is understanding and combating disease outbreaks like this one, has lost nearly 3,000 staff under Trump, while the Food and Drug Administration has lost more than 4,000. Food safety inspections have been going undone as a result. In February 2025, FDA Deputy Commissioner Jim Jones angrily resigned from the agency’s Human Foods Program, which monitors food safety, after dozens of his workers were sacked. And in July that year, Kennedy directed the CDC to cut six out of eight pathogens, cyclospora among them, monitored as part of its FoodNet program.

First measles, now cyclospora, and what next? We have been fortunate so far that the number of deaths in the measles outbreak have been low, and that so far nobody has died from cyclosporiasis, despite hundreds of hospitalizations. But don't give up on a truly bloody denouement to Kennedy's tenure. He and Trump will surely keep doing their worst.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.