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Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, on Monday called on Taylor Farms to provide information about its connections with the White House amid a parasitic outbreak potentially linked to the company’s lettuce supply.
Garcia wrote a letter to Taylor Farms CEO Bruce Taylor questioning whether the company used its influence on the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) investigation into the outbreak.
“Evidence points to Taylor Farms products as a source of the outbreak, but reports indicate that your company may have attempted to influence the ongoing Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigation into the matter, obfuscate Taylor Farms’ role in a public health crisis, and mislead consumers trying to keep their families safe,” Garcia wrote.
The Hill has reached out to Taylor Farms for comment.
In his letter, Garcia wrote that Taylor Farms had donated $1 million to President Trump’s super PAC in 2025 and donated more than $2 million to PACs tied to the president and other Republicans.
“Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said that the outbreak is ‘under control,’ yet that seems far from true as cases continue to rise,” he continued.
Garcia wrote about the FDA identifying the link between Americans falling ill with cyclosporiasis and eating lettuce from Taco Bell restaurants in five states but noted that the FDA “did not publicly identify Taylor Farms as the source of that lettuce.”
“Reporting indicates that, by that point, federal officials had already reached out to Taylor Farms, and Taylor Farms executives met privately with officials from both the White House and FDA on the evening of July 16 ‘to distance the company from the outbreak and cast doubt on the officials’ conclusion,'” the Democratic congressman wrote.
The FDA announced a positive cyclospora test after Taylor Farms de Mexico was publicly identified as the processing facility where the contaminated lettuce allegedly originated. But after the FDA announced that it had a false positive, Taylor Farms said it accepted the agency’s apology and said it was still cooperating with federal health officials.
The agency later clarified that the false positive does not change the investigation’s basis or the data supporting the Taylor Farms recall.
“Regardless of the fact that the false positive does not exonerate Taylor Farms from a role in the outbreak and that ‘overwhelming epidemiological data’ points to Taylor Farms’ involvement, Taylor Farms posted on social media that the FDA ‘apologized’ to the company –– a claim which FDA denied,” Garcia wrote.
He requested a series of communications exchanged by Taylor and his company with federal agencies like the White House, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — as well as with facilities such as Taylor Farms de Mexico — related “to sanitary conditions, quality control or contamination … including but not limited to inspection, audit, risk assessment reports, or analysis.”
The CDC has confirmed nearly 2,000 cases of cyclospora across nine states, but 41 state health departments have reported thousands of other infections. Those nine states are Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Symptoms of the illness include watery diarrhea, loss of appetite, weight loss, cramping and bloating.
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