House Democrats Put Their Health Care Agenda on Paper. Food Gets a Chapter and Sixteen Bills — and Exactly One of Them Deals With a Pathogen. Here Is All of It, the One That Made the Cut, and What Is Missing.

First, a tip of the hat. Helena Bottemiller Evich of Food Fix sent this my way, and if you are not reading Helena on food policy, you should be. The document is an 84-page memo to House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries from the caucus’s Cost-of-Living Healthcare Working Group, dated September 1, 2026, and posted by Politico. It is a roadmap for what Democrats say they would move in the first 100 hours, the first 100 days, and the first year of the 120th Congress if they win the House. The working group says it held 93 meetings with 139 members and 145 outside groups to build it.

Most of the memo is about things I do not do for a living — Medicare Advantage, pharmacy benefit managers, drug patents, medical debt, nurse staffing. I will leave those to others. But Section VII, titled “Reclaiming MAHA and Protecting American Families,” is about food, and I read every word of it and of the bill summaries behind it. What follows is a quick tour of everything food safety and nutrition related in the memo, and then the part that is in my wheelhouse: pathogens — what is there, and what is not.

The framing is right. The memo says Americans’ worries about chronic disease and food safety are legitimate and long overdue for a serious legislative response, and it cites polling showing 75 percent of Americans want stricter food additive rules. It argues that HHS Secretary Kennedy and the administration have used those worries to spread vaccine misinformation while rolling back the rules that protect our food, air and water. It names “the current Cyclospora outbreak” as a consequence. And in its opening pages it faults the administration for eliminating programs “we rely on to prevent, detect, and contain disease outbreaks.” I agree with every one of those sentences. Hold onto that last one; I will come back to it.

Everything food- and nutrition-related in the memo. By my count there are sixteen bills or policy ideas in Section VII, sorted by when the working group wants them moved:

First 100 hours

• H.R. 7601, No Immunity for Glyphosate Act (Reps. Massie and Pingree) — cuts off funding for the President’s glyphosate executive order, preserving state-law claims against manufacturers like Bayer/Monsanto.
• H.R. 7867, Infant Formula Safety Modernization Act of 2026 (Rep. DeLauro) — required pathogen testing of formula plants and finished product, including Clostridium botulinum. More on this below.
• H.R. 8429, Baby Food Safety Act of 2026 (Rep. Krishnamoorthi) — enforceable FDA limits on lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury in baby food, quarterly testing, and mandatory recall authority for products over the limits.

First 100 days

• H.R. 4958, GRAS Act (Rep. Pallone) — ends “Generally Recognized As Safe” self-certification and requires FDA review before new uses go to market, plus reassessment of substances already on shelves.
• H.R. 8370, Dietary Supplement Listing Act of 2026 (Rep. Dexter) — mandatory product listing with FDA and a public database.
• H.R. 2339, Children’s Health Protection Act of 2025 (Rep. Nadler) — makes EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection permanent.
• Food is Medicine — H.R. 7906, the FOOD for Health Act; H.R. 8390, the National Food as Medicine Program Act; H.R. 5439, a Medicare pilot for medically tailored meals after hospital discharge; and H.R. 7267, produce prescriptions for veterans.
• School meals — H.R. 9474, the Local Foods for Healthy Schools Act, and H.R. 8928, the Scratch Cooked Meals for Students Act.

First year

• H.R. 5085, Protect America’s Children from Toxic Pesticides Act (Rep. McGovern) — bans paraquat, organophosphates and neonicotinoids and suspends pesticides already banned in the EU or Canada pending review.
• H.R. 9231, No Toxic Chemicals in Food Packaging Act of 2026 (Rep. Schakowsky) — keeps PFAS and other hazardous chemicals out of food-contact materials, regulated by class so one chemical cannot simply be swapped for its cousin.
• Banning harmful additives in school meals (policy idea, no bill text yet) — bars Red 40, Yellow 5 and 6, Blue 1 and 2, and Green 3 from federal school meals.
• H.R. 6294, Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act of 2025 (Reps. Beyer and Lawler) — front-of-package warning labels on sugary drinks and ultra-processed foods and limits on marketing them to children.

There is a lot on that list worth supporting. Ending GRAS self-certification closes what the memo rightly calls the largest gap in U.S. food safety law, and binding heavy-metal limits in baby food are years overdue. But read the list again: heavy metals, additives, dyes, pesticides, packaging, supplements, nutrition. Those are real risks, mostly chronic and long-tail. Of the sixteen items, exactly one — the formula bill — is about bacteria, viruses or parasites, the things that put children in intensive care this week. I searched all 84 pages. The words Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli, norovirus, raw milk, sprouts, poultry, FSIS, FSMA and traceability do not appear. Cyclospora appears once, as a talking point.

The one pathogen bill: H.R. 7867. I have been pushing Congresswoman DeLauro’s bill since she introduced it, and I am glad to see it slotted into the first 100 hours. The memo’s justification is the right one: Abbott’s Sturgis Cronobacter shutdown in 2022, and the ByHeart C. botulinum outbreak that, by the memo’s count, sickened at least 51 infants in 19 states — “two safety crises in four years.” I represent families from both the ByHeart and Nara Organics botulism outbreaks, so I have a stake in getting this right.

Because I support it, I went back and read the bill text line by line against the memo’s description. Here is what it actually does:

• Directs FDA to update the infant formula good manufacturing practices to require pathogen testing of the manufacturing facility and of finished product, on top of the existing Cronobacter and Salmonellarequirements.
• Requires FDA to write a mandatory pathogen list. C. botulinum is the only organism the bill names; everything else is up to the Secretary.
• Requires a recommended frequency for environmental testing, including Zones 2 and 3 of the plant.
• Requires a manufacturer to notify FDA within one business day of any positive in formula, even if the product never left the building.
• Requires records of positives, in formula and in the facility, to be kept for inspectors.
• Requires FDA to tell the appropriations and health committees in both chambers within one business day of a finished-formula positive or an “Official Action Indicated” inspection finding.
• Requires consistent inspection and compliance standards regardless of country of origin, and final rules within 90 days.

That is a real step forward, and the one-day notice provision alone closes a gap that should never have existed. But a two-page bill leaves most of the hard questions to FDA, and for whoever marks it up, here is where I would make it stronger:

• Make environmental testing mandatory, not recommended. The text asks FDA to set a “recommended frequency.” Recommendations are not enforceable. Set a floor.
• Report environmental positives. The one-day notice applies only to positives in infant formula. A C. botulinum hit in Zone 2 only has to be written down and kept for an inspector. An environmental positive is the early warning — the whole point of looking for it is to act before product is contaminated.
• Name Zone 1. The bill calls out Zones 2 and 3 but never mentions food-contact surfaces by name. It should.
• Test ingredients. FDA’s whole-genome sequencing traced the ByHeart botulinum to organic whole milk powder at the supplier’s processor. The bill reaches the formula plant and the finished can — not the incoming ingredients where ByHeart’s problem started.
• Set a sampling floor and hold the product. C. botulinum spores in powder are hard to find at low levels, and a negative test on a handful of grams proves very little. The sampling plan decides whether testing means anything. Write a minimum into the statute, and require that lots be held until results come back.
• Backstop the deadline. Ninety days is not a realistic timeline for notice-and-comment rulemaking, and the bill says nothing about what happens if FDA misses it. Give it teeth.

None of that is a reason to slow the bill down. It is a reason to make sure that when it passes, it does what parents will assume it does.

What is missing. Here is where the memo goes quiet.

Meat and poultry. USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service does not appear anywhere in the memo. In 2025, USDA withdrew its proposed framework that would have treated high levels of Salmonella in raw poultry as adulteration. Salmonella makes an estimated 1.35 million Americans sick every year. We have done this before: the Jack in the Box outbreak pushed FSIS to declare E. coli O157:H7 an adulterant in ground beef in 1994, and hamburger got dramatically safer. A Democratic food safety agenda that skips poultry has skipped the biggest single pathogen problem in the American food supply.

Produce and Cyclospora. The memo cites “the current Cyclospora outbreak” — and it is a big one. The cluster tied to Taylor Farms de México iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell had reached 10,930 illnesses in 17 states, at least 454 hospitalizations and two deaths as of August 20, and CDC notes the true number is likely much higher. Yet the memo proposes nothing on produce: nothing on agricultural water, nothing on imported produce inspection, nothing on traceability. Meanwhile, FDA has pushed back the compliance date for the food traceability rule — the rule that is supposed to let investigators follow a head of lettuce back to the field — to 2028.

Raw milk, raw milk cheese and sprouts. For a chapter titled “Reclaiming MAHA,” the silence on raw milk is striking. Raw milk is the movement’s signature food. This fall alone we have seen the Graziers raw milk cheese *E. coli* O26 outbreak and two little girls with HUS after drinking milk from an unlicensed goat dairy. On or shortly after October 9, I plan to file FDA citizen petitions asking for warning statements on cheese made from unpasteurized milk and on raw sprouts. A Democratic agenda could simply direct FDA to grant them.

The people who find outbreaks. Remember that sentence from the memo’s opening, faulting the administration for eliminating the programs we use to prevent, detect and contain outbreaks? Not one proposal in the memo restores them. The National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods — the body that advised both FDA and USDA on pathogens, criteria and sampling — was terminated in 2025, as Susan Mayne pointed out this week. FDA’s foods program has lost experts and staff. CDC’s FoodNet surveillance has been scaled back. And right now eleven open investigations on FDA’s outbreak table name no food at all, and they carry 675 sick people. You cannot recall what you cannot identify, and you cannot identify what nobody is funded to look for.

What I would add. If House Democrats want a food safety agenda that matches their rhetoric, here is a pathogen package that would fit comfortably in the first 100 days:

1. Pass H.R. 7867 — with mandatory environmental testing, reporting of environmental positives, ingredient testing, and a statutory sampling floor.
2. Direct FSIS to finalize enforceable Salmonella standards for raw poultry.
3. Restore NACMCF, fully fund CDC and state foodborne illness surveillance and public health labs, and rebuild FDA’s Human Foods Program staff.
4. Hold the line on food traceability — no more delays.
5. Require warning statements on raw milk cheese and raw sprouts, and enforce the existing ban on interstate sale of raw milk.
6. Fund FDA inspection of imported produce and finish the agricultural water rules.

None of this is partisan. Look at the cosponsors already on the bills in this memo — Thomas Massie on glyphosate, Jeff Van Drew on infant formula, Mike Lawler on front-of-package labels, Jen Kiggans on Food is Medicine. Republicans and Democrats both have kids who eat lettuce, chicken and formula.

The memo is right that food safety is a winning issue and right that Americans want it taken seriously. Chemicals are the long fight, and I hope Democrats win it. But pathogens are what make people sick this week, and they deserve more than one bill and one passing mention of Cyclospora. If the goal is to reclaim MAHA, start with what is putting people in the hospital right now. And then let’s make it so the next time someone like me goes looking for a case, there isn’t one to find. That has always been the goal — to put myself out of business by making food safe. Here is the full document.