Just before Thanksgiving, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out a familiar-sounding warning: Avoid Romaine lettuce. The latest crop is a carrier for E. coli, and so far at least 13 people have been hospitalized in this latest outbreak. The reason that sounds familiar is because the same thing happened back in 2011, when more than 200 people in three dozen states contracted the bacteria, resulting in 27 kidney failures and five deaths.

Fruits and vegetables carry E. coli if they're exposed to contaminated water, and salad greens, typically eaten raw, are especially prone to spreading it. Water can get contaminated by livestock or wildlife waste, and that fecal runoff can easily make its way into farming irrigation. So, Congress passed legislation requiring farmers to test irrigation water for pathogens. The legislation would have gone into effect earlier this year, based on criteria drawn up by the Obama-era Food and Drug Administration. As Wired reports:

But six months before people were sickened by the contaminated romaine, President Donald Trump’s FDA – responding to pressure from the farm industry and Trump’s order to eliminate regulations – shelved the water-testing rules for at least four years.

Despite this deadly outbreak, the FDA has shown no sign of reconsidering its plan to postpone the rules. The agency also is considering major changes, such as allowing some produce growers to test less frequently or find alternatives to water testing to ensure the safety of their crops.

The FDA’s lack of urgency dumbfounds food safety scientists.

The lack of urgency from the FDA mirrors Trump's own. He often refuses to acknowledge the findings of his own administration, be it on economics or climate change when they don't say what he wants them to say. In fact, he spent Thanksgiving eating Caesar salad despite the CDC's recall warning.

But the connection also reveals what Trump and other wildly pro-business Republicans mean when they talk about the tyranny of big government. He's helped them fight "over-regulation," which for this administration means letting companies pump more mercury into the air or worry less about worker safety. Because it costs a lot less money to ignore petty things like making sure that crap-filled water isn't saturating your bagged lettuce.