President Donald Trump’s administration has moved to end a hostile regulatory pressure campaign against the cyclospora parasite, shuttering three federal research projects that officials described as an unwarranted burden on the flourishing intestinal pathogen.
Acting on what sources close to leadership called a mandate to reduce red tape, the U.S. Department of Agriculture formally shelved its scientific inquiries into the organism this weekend. The cessation of research ensures the parasite—which has successfully sickened tens of thousands of Americans this summer—can continue its rapid domestic expansion without the looming threat of government scientists figuring out how to stop it.
Two of the USDA projects were quietly stripped of funding by Congress earlier this year in a bipartisan effort to let the free market decide how much explosive diarrhea consumers should tolerate. The third and final investigative team is being forcibly relocated from its specialized Maryland laboratories to a general-purpose agricultural facility in Iowa, a move designed to permanently disrupt any momentum the researchers had gained against the pathogen.
For too long, Washington bureaucrats have picked winners and losers in the human digestive tract, treating this highly motivated protozoan as a menace rather than an unregulated biological entrepreneur.
The policy shift represents a broader administration strategy to deregulate the American microbiome. According to internal talking points circulated on Capitol Hill, lawmakers have been instructed to frame the defunding as a victory for states' rights, arguing that local municipalities should be the ones to negotiate truces with microscopic spores.
Freed from the chilling effect of federal oversight, the parasite is expected to rapidly expand its operations across the domestic pre-washed lettuce sector.