El-Sayed Pledges to Probe RFK Jr. Over Summer’s ‘Crap Lettuce' Outbreak That Hit Michigan Hard

Michigan was the epicenter of the cyclosporiasis outbreak that hit the United States last summer, and the state's new Democratic senator-elect plans to find out why after taking office in January.

Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed, who faced virulently racist attacks from members of the Trump administration, including Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., during his campaign, told CNN Thursday that he plans to investigate Kennedy's handling of the outbreak of the illness caused by the Cyclospora parasite, which sickened more than 15,000 Michiganders, hospitalized more than 370, and killed two people in the state.

El-Sayed emphasized that he is not out for "retribution for something past," but said an investigation into staffing cuts at HHS would be focused on "understanding what happened, holding people accountable for what they did, and then solving the problem moving forward."

"People need to feel it in their back pockets and in their homes," said El-Sayed.

The former public health official said the Trump administration had "DOGE-ed out the part of the Food and Drug Administration and the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] that was intended both to protect you from eating lettuce that had been defiled by somebody else, and counting the number of cases," referring to the Department of Government Efficiency.

Under the leadership of GOP megadonor Elon Musk, DOGE cut staffing at a CDC lab tasked with responding to Cyclospora and other parasitic outbreaks from 11 people to just three.

The US Department of Agriculture shut down three key research projects regarding the parasite, which can cause explosive diarrhea and other gastrointestinal symptoms when it contaminates food. Two of the projects were defunded by the Republican-controlled Congress, while a third was moved from Maryland to Iowa as part of a reorganization of the agency, and the scientists working on the research declined to relocate, jeopardizing the study.

The CDC also removed Cyclospora from its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet, in 2025 as part of Kennedy's changes to the agency.

Kennedy said the outbreak was "under control" on July 21, when 1,600 people were sick across the country. Dozens of people in Michigan continued to become ill over the following month. The outbreak was ultimately linked to lettuce that was grown in central Mexico by Taylor Farms de Mexico.

The HHS secretary claimed that the allegations that his cuts had reduced the government's ability to respond to the outbreak were "invalid," saying there were "no cuts in the surveillance program."

“We did cuts in the FoodNet program, but they were redundant surveillance," said Kennedy.

El-Sayed said Thursday that he aims "to understand why he's... done this, the decision-making that's gone on, and what we need to do to solve the problem in its depth. And that takes understanding the nature of the problem."

He added that legislation could come out of an investigation.

"There's no reason that we couldn't have one clean bill, right? The Crap Lettuce Elimination Act, whatever we want to call it, to just make sure that we have a FDA that's functioning," said El-Sayed. "It's not just lettuce. We're talking—seeing recalls in blueberries. We're seeing recalls in blackberries. We're seeing recalls in meat. And that's because the FDA's not working."

The senator-elect also said the ascent of Kennedy, who has publicly questioned the safety of vaccines and halted immunization research, is among the Trump administration appointments that raise questions about how President Donald Trump is selecting his nominees for top government positions.

“I think this administration has shown that the decisions that they make about who is engaged in government, leading government, that that's more about backroom deals and who curries favor than it is about their capacity to do the job," said El-Sayed. "When you nominate somebody like RFK Jr., who is anti-science, to run HHS, what you get is a bunch of nasty crap lettuce in the state of Michigan."

When considering Trump's nominees as a senator, El-Sayed added, "I'm going to assume I'm not going to support you until proven otherwise. So the bar is going to be extremely high. I want to know that this person was chosen on their merit and the capacity to serve the American public."