A flesh-eating parasite that was supposed to stay eradicated is now confirmed in Texas livestock, and you can thank the same administration that gutted the agencies built to stop it.
The New World screwworm, a parasitic fly whose larvae literally burrow through living flesh and can kill an animal if untreated, was officially detected in a three-week-old calf in Zavala County, Texas this week. This was not a surprise to anyone paying attention. The pest had been spreading northward through Central America and Mexico since at least 2022, and experts projected it would reach the U.S. by 2025.
What changed the math was the trump administration cutting roughly 15 percent of the USDA's entire workforce, around 15,000 people, including those responsible for monitoring and fighting exactly this kind of agricultural threat. The program that fights screwworms works by releasing millions of sterilized male flies to disrupt breeding, a slow, science-dependent, international cooperation kind of effort that requires, well, a functioning government.
Instead, DOGE took a chainsaw to the USDA so the wealthiest Americans could pocket a bigger tax cut, and now the cattle industry is staring down a potential $10.6 billion disaster.
And here is the part that hits everyone at the kitchen table: beef prices are already at a record high, with ground beef hitting $6.69 a pound in December 2025, up 72 percent since 2020. The screwworm border closures have already cut off over a million head of Mexican feeder cattle that American feedlots depend on, and the USDA is forecasting another 6.9 percent increase in wholesale beef prices in 2026. This is what happens when you gut the agencies designed to catch these problems early so billionaires can get a bigger tax cut.
The irony is almost too much: the ranchers and agricultural states that went hard for trump in 2024 are now the ones watching flesh-eating maggots show up in their herds. A Texas state Republican rep had been sounding the alarm for over a year while, as he put it, "federal regulators moved at a snail's pace."
That snail's pace had a price tag, and every American buying ground beef is paying it now.
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