The primary driver of inflation in the U.S. economy—the forever war in Iran—has not yet taken full effect. Now we’ve found an entirely new driver.
Last week, the flesh-eating parasite known as the New World screwworm was found in a calf in Texas; a second case was identified about five miles away shortly thereafter. (A third case was found in a dog.) Screwworm flies lay their eggs in the live tissue of warm-blooded animals, from livestock to pets to humans. These larvae “screw” into the animal’s flesh, and while they are not very harmful to humans, in that the horrifying effects of maggots chewing into your skin are relatively easy to notice and address, they can kill a livestock host if not treated. In a widespread infestation, one of the last resorts would be mass culling, which would obviously have huge impacts on a diminished U.S. cattle herd.
The total herd count already sits at a catastrophic 75-year low, in part because of the screwworm outbreak that broke past a firebreak in Central America starting in 2023. The U.S.-Mexico border has for the past year been closed to live cattle auctions, affecting the feeder cattle that come in through Mexico to rebuild herds. But closing the border did not stop the flies from coming.
Low cattle volumes have sent the price of beef skyward to levels not seen since the Korean War, up between 20 and 35 percent in the past year. A screwworm outbreak would seriously aggravate that spike. In other words, you probably should have ordered your last hamburgers of the summer a week ago.
An outbreak would dramatically impact ranchers who have been in a deep hole for the past decade from reduced stocks, and more recently from drought, tariffs, imports of cattle pushed by President Trump to lower the price, a war in Iran that has spiked costs of fertilizer and fuel, and now the screwworm. “The cattle producer in the U.S. has already been under extreme financial stress,” says Joe Maxwell, president of Farm Action Fund and a farmer in Missouri, where he once served in the state legislature and as lieutenant governor. “This is serious, the screwworm outbreak. But it’s even more serious because of the financial position they were already under.”
Elon Musk’s DOGE cut the screwworm monitoring programs, maximizing the risk.
These impacts are why the U.S. worked so hard for 60 years to prevent the screwworm’s return. In an obscure yet effective government program, the government bred enormous quantities of male screwworms that it irradiated to make them sterile. It then airdropped them into the Panamanian rainforest to mate with females. Those assignations produce no larvae, eradicating the threat of northward migration. This was so successful that there hasn’t been a single identified case in cattle in Texas since 1966—until last week.
It’s a good example of a government program that can easily be demonized by self-described fiscal conservatives who love to find funny-sounding initiatives to push their argument that America spends too much taxpayer money on nonsense. You can imagine John McCain or Tom Coburn or Bobby Jindal smirking about spending millions of dollars to sterilize a parasitic worm. Well, guess what: Sometimes things that sound ridiculous to the ignorant layman in Congress are critically important.
With this outbreak, the Trump administration is finding out that effective government is the only thing preventing serious disruptions to commerce, if not terrible hardship for farmers, consumers, and everyone else. It is not just a playground for silly tree-hugging liberal scientists that can be destroyed to save a buck.
ANIMAL DISEASE MONITORING PROGRAMS, including those tracking the screwworm, were under the control of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Elon Musk’s barely postadolescent cybercriminal henchmen tossed “into the wood chipper” shortly after President Trump’s inauguration. A ban on bison, horse, and cattle imports from Mexico was put in place by the Biden administration in November 2024, but after an inspection protocol was put in place, the border was reopened on Trump’s watch in February 2025. But DOGE cut the screwworm monitoring programs soon thereafter, maximizing the risk. Monitoring obviously provides an early warning for when more aggressive measures will be needed.
The administration also cut funding and staff for animal disease control and prevention programs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), including for New World screwworm and other pathogens like avian flu. That funding supported global investigations and lab testing and could have more quickly responded to outbreaks. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which has primary authority for preventing things like screwworm outbreaks, lost 1,300 employees last year.
As cases of screwworm in cattle grew last May, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins did reinstate the live import ban, following up with an $8.5 million sterile screwworm dispersal plan last June, and a more permanent sterile fly breeding facility in Texas in July. USDA also announced a plan to “innovate our way to eradication” by investing in better traps and lures and genetic modifications.
But the main focus of USDA, says Maxwell, has not been protecting the domestic cattle herd, but DOGE-style destruction. “The administration has been set out from day one to dismantle USDA,” he said, citing multiple program closures, rampant regional staff cuts, and the shuttering of the South Building that is scattering officials across the country. This drive to pick apart the agency has failed farmers and ranchers, Maxwell says: “I can’t say if they hadn’t done it, then [the outbreak] wouldn’t have happened. Flies fly. But it’s clearly a lack of understanding as to the vital purpose of USDA, one of the largest departments in the United States. It’s that big not because it’s inefficient—you have to be that big because it’s a big job.”
On CNBC Monday, Rollins tried to blame the Biden administration’s “open borders policy” for the outbreak, despite the fact that the total average lifespan of a screwworm fly is 21 days, and Trump has been in office for nearly 17 months. The more likely explanation is that an administration with an antipathy to government ignored government’s purpose until it was too late. “To me that was evidence that they know they screwed up and they couldn’t own it,” Maxwell says.
THERE ARE SOME MORE LONG-STANDING ISSUES that led to the outbreak. Years ago, the U.S. pulled back all its sterile fly breeding facilities except for one in Panama, which was reasonable at the time because the firebreak was holding. But now it means that there aren’t enough sterile flies out there. The government is refashioning a facility in Mexico used for breeding fruit flies, as well as adding one in Texas, which when completed will be capable of producing 300 million sterile flies a week.
But the $600 million Texas facility is not scheduled to be completed until late next year, though federal spending reports put the completion date as late as September 2028. The dispensing facility originating from Moore Air Force Base opened in February, but while about four million flies have been dispersed, that is about one one-hundredth of what it would take each week to eradicate the pest.
Once the screwworm is detected inside the U.S., the normal movement of livestock across the country from ranches to slaughterhouses makes it extremely difficult to quarantine the outbreak, even if ranchers fully report the cases, which is unlikely because the impacts to their bottom lines are so dire. You also must airdrop over a much larger area in the U.S. and Mexico rather than a modest stretch of the narrow Panamanian isthmus, which means you need more sterile flies, more planes, more of everything.
In other words, staff for monitoring, tracking, and early detection is as important to eliminate the threat as the sterile insect technique that eradicates after the fact. “You need boots on the ground for surveillance,” Maxwell said. “They set up traps and determine the advancement of these flies, where do we have to be to get ahead of them. That takes boots on the ground, and at the county level, you can’t convert people because they’re not there.”
Texas Senate candidate James Talarico (D-TX) has called for a reinstatement of full personnel at USDA to respond to the outbreak. Even Republican Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller has criticized USDA because it “moved too slowly and relied solely on a partial solution that takes years to fully implement.” Inadequate detection is part of that. Miller has said that the whole state will likely be infested in six months.
The last screwworm outbreak in the U.S. was in wild deer in the Florida Keys ten years ago, and it was contained. Rollins is claiming that there will be no wide-scale infestation in the country (of course, she also said it wouldn’t reach here at all). But anti-screwworm eradication efforts in 1976, when the parasite was more prevalent in Mexico and there were isolated cases in the Southwest, cost the equivalent of $732 million to Texas livestock producers and another $1.8 billion to the broader economy, in today’s dollars, according to an APHIS report. And that was without screwworm sightings inside the country.
Already, Canada has blocked livestock from Texas, the first major economic impact. Limiting movement through quarantines would arguably be a better scenario than dying and wasting cattle, but it will still leave a mark. And it’s impossible to rebuild the cattle herd when this threat is imminent.
As my colleague Gabrielle Gurley wrote last year, the fact that flies like the screwworm thrive in hotter climates can increase risk from this and other pathogens. It’s yet another example of the threats to long, intermediated supply chains, whether disease or natural disasters or ongoing wars. Climate change is already hitting us all directly in the wallet, in this and dozens of other ways. But the titans of commerce have yet to understand and take action to mitigate these risks. But we know that government plays an indispensable role in that. Nobody gets credit when something bad doesn’t happen. That doesn’t make spending the time, resources, and effort on prevention wasteful or unnecessary.
