Hutzell: Andy Harris helped make Americans sick this summer

You can blame U.S. Rep. Andy Harris when contaminated food makes Americans sick again.

Maryland’s only Republican in Congress didn’t harvest cyclospora-tainted lettuce this summer, ship it from fields in Mexico or serve it at Taco Bell locations around the country.

But as chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee that controls Food and Drug Administration funding, the representative helped delay a rule that could have helped trace the contaminated food quickly and limited the spread of explosive diarrhea among those who ate it.

Instead, investigators spent weeks tracking the major source of the cyclospora outbreak while thousands of people got sick across 48 other states, including more than 100 in Maryland.

“It never should have been as big as it was,” said attorney Bill Marler, whose law firm is a leading advocate for victims of food poisoning. “If you had been able to get traceability, you would have said, ‘Oh, yeah, they were farmed from Mexico. Boom! Let’s get this stuff off the market.’”

Harris didn’t respond to requests for comment on the Food Traceability Rule or his role in delaying it at his Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies Subcommittee.

He has, however, said he takes food safety seriously.

“Agriculture is the economic backbone of Maryland’s First Congressional District, and it touches the lives of Americans daily as we all depend on a safe food and drug supply,” he said after being named chair again in 2025.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared this year’s worst food poisoning outbreak over on Friday. Harris, a retired Johns Hopkins anesthesiologist who once wanted to head the National Institutes of Health, doesn’t appear to have said anything about it.

As illnesses began to spread in May, public attention focused on the Trump administration’s decision to remove cyclosporiasis and other illnesses from the food safety reporting system, FoodNet. That, critics said, kept health officials from detecting the outbreak sooner.

But the Food Traceability Rule could have limited its spread.

The rule is part of the Food Safety Modernization Act, signed into law in 2011 by President Barack Obama. It requires roughly 323,000 food-handling businesses to track food digitally with lot codes.

The FDA was supposed to write the rule by 2013, but it didn’t finish regulations until a judge ordered it to do so by 2022.

Big companies were ready with their own systems, but industry groups pushed to delay the compliance date until January 2026. They argued that it was too cumbersome and too costly.

When President Donald Trump returned to office nearly two years ago, his administration shelved the rule until June 2028.

Two members of Harris’ House subcommittee, Republican Scott Franklin of Florida and Democrat Sanford Bishop of Georgia, tried to put that delay into law by blocking any spending on enforcement. Their bill failed.

Instead, Harris’ subcommittee added key elements to spending bills — writing the new date into the FDA budget and requiring the agency to work on a more flexible rule.

Harris controls that process — nothing gets approved in committee without the chair.

The representative has described his work on the subcommittee as restoring “fiscal restraint.” He rejected President Joe Biden’s proposed 32% increase for the FDA in 2023 and supported DOGE job cuts to the agency under Trump.

“FDA has a total budget of $7.1 billion to enable the agency to keep food, drugs and medical devices safe and effective, as well as advancing the Make America Healthy Again initiatives highlighted in the president’s budget,” he said in April.

Marler followed the delay of the tracing rule from his office in Bremerton, Washington.

“It doesn’t seem very hard to figure out that the reason we’ve been waiting is because the businesses that don’t want to pay for this or don’t want to go to the difficulty of doing this are using their influence in Congress,” he said.

Marler got involved in food safety in the 1990s. An E. coli outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants across western states killed four children, put 171 people in the hospital and made hundreds more sick.

He spent decades representing people sickened by contaminated hamburger until meat processors realized that fixing the problem was cheaper than paying damages.

“Eventually, the industry bucked up and fixed the problem,” Marler said.

In a July 2025 letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, The Food Industry Association warned that the traceability rule would increase food costs. The association did not respond to a request for comment, but its president later hailed the delay.

“Our member companies are spending millions of dollars every day to try to comply with its complexity, even as it is clear the rule is unworkable in its current form and may not achieve the agency’s stated goals,” said Leslie G. Sarasin, the association’s president and CEO.

The association awarded Harris its Thomas Jefferson Award twice, calling him a champion of the food distribution industry.

Democrat Dan Schwartz has made Harris’ work with corporations a major theme of his campaign to unseat the eight-term representative.

“As a physician and as a representative for the people here in the 1st Congressional District, he should want to keep people safe,” Schwartz said. “He should want to keep our food system safe and prevent people from having foodborne illnesses.”

Federal authorities have investigated 21 major foodborne illness outbreaks this year, and the FDA has recalled 160 food products. Something clearly needs to change.

Marler expects that investigators will find the cause of the lettuce contamination.

And he predicted that there will be more outbreaks.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous that in 2026 we’re having a cyclospora outbreak in the United States that has sickened at least 32,000 people,” he said. “And if we don’t get our s--- together, this is what every summer is going to look like for the foreseeable future.”