Johnson says Texans may have gotten sick because Washington protects donors before it protects the food supply
TEXAS — Nathan Johnson today released a new digital ad connecting the nationwide and Texas cyclosporiasis outbreak to a Washington playbook: gut the agencies meant to catch problems like this, then look the other way when a well-connected company gets caught in one.
“In another time, most of us would give the FDA the benefit of the doubt. But with the recklessness of DOGE and the regulatory capture by the industry, and the influence of big political money, we should not give government the benefit of the doubt,” said Johnson. We can’t because all of these things are examples of corruption, and it’s rampant — the use of private wealth and concentrated commercial power to control public power. We need to get back to a time of being able to trust that the government is protecting the public and working in the public interest.”
DOGE, Cash, and Tainted Lettuce. Corruption Threatens Public Health.
To view the full digital ad, WATCH HERE.
An estimated 18,000 people across 45 states have gotten sick from cyclospora traced to shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms, with hospitalizations still climbing.
The ad argues that an outbreak like this was to be expected, given the actions by what Johnson called “Elon Musk’s aDOGE idiots”. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cut the CDC’s cyclospora team to just three staffers, down from eleven, and the agency quietly made tracking the parasite optional instead of mandatory across its food-safety monitoring network. Around the same time, regulators delayed a food traceability rule the industry had lobbied against. Then, weeks after Taylor Farms’s lettuce was traced to the outbreak, the FDA abruptly reversed a positive lab test and called it a false positive, even as its own investigators said the evidence still points to the same company’s lettuce.
The ad connects Taylor Farms’s million-dollar donation to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC to a broader pattern of state and federal agencies that are supposed to referee the marketplace instead of running interference for whoever has the deepest pockets. Johnson’s anti-corruption plan calls for conflict-of-interest reviews, whistleblower protections, and enforcement against exactly this kind of pay-to-play arrangement between regulators and the industries they oversee.
“As attorney general I will do my part to restore trust in public government,” concludes Johnson. “No political favors, no special treatment, no pay to play. Just honest government in the public interest.”
READ NATHAN JOHNSON’S ANTI-CORRUPTION PLAN HERE.
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