Oh Good, We've Reached The 'Flesh-Eating Screwworm' Stage Of The Trump Administration
Ew.
Disclaimer: This post will not feature any pictures of screwworms, because of how they are extremely gross and I don’t want to look at them. Feel free to Google image search them yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
On Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins very confidently stated that the rumors of an impending invasion of flesh-eating New World Screwworms were absolutely false, assuring Republican Texas state Rep. Don McLaughlin that the closest of the cow-killing flies (because they’re actually flies, not worms) were at least 25 miles from the border.
McLaughlin, you see, had put out a statement the day before saying that they were only a mile away, asking for some protection for Texas farmers.
“For more than a year, I have joined Texas ranchers in sounding the alarm while federal regulators have moved at a snail’s pace,” said McLaughlin. “Today, the threat is no longer hundreds of miles away. It is at our doorstep. Texas cannot afford to wait until the New World Screwworm crosses the border and begins devastating our livestock and wildlife.”
In response, Rollins patronizingly referred to McLaughlin as a “well-intentioned state legislator” whilst also reprimanding him for having spread such dangerous misinformation.
“When that false information gets out, it causes significant panic,” Rollins said. “And rightly so, especially if it’s coming from elected officials and the media.”
She doubled down on social media, writing, “We’re keeping the public updated in real time, shutting down rumors, and laying down the facts on exactly what we and our state partners are doing to protect American agriculture, livestock, and wildlife.”
Well! Either McLaughlin was actually correct or we are dealing with some real super flies (apologies to Curtis Mayfield), because those motherfuckers ended up in Texas the very next day. More specifically, they ended up in a three-month-old calf — the first such case since the flies were eradicated from the US in the 1960s. Although last year there was a screwworm found in a woman who had traveled from El Salvador (she survived).
The calf has since been quarantined and they’re hoping that the case will be a one-off, but that seems somewhat unlikely.
This is a very, very big deal for Texas farmers and pet-owners and for the meat-eating, dairy milk-drinking public. Also people who, while aware that such circumstances are rare, are going to spend a lot of time in the coming days freaking out about being eaten alive from the inside out by fly larvae. An outbreak could wind up costing the nation up to $10.6 billion.
Prior to the 1960s, screwworms cost the agricultural industry millions of dollars a year. Starting in the 1950s, the country invested billions into a plan to mass breed screwworms in factories, radiate them so they became sterile, and then send them out to mate with other screwworms in the wild — unions that would produce no offspring. Because the factory-made screwworms outnumbered the wild screwworms 10-1, this eventually led to the end of the species in the United States. Ta da!
Now, you may be thinking “Is this the Trump administration’s fault, though? How can they be responsible for that?”
In so many ways! Remember DOGE? Well, DOGE cut about 15 percent of the USDA’s workforce. They also slashed USAID to bits, killing funding for over 5,300 programs around the world. This included programs dedicated to monitoring and containing screwworm populations. Also avian flu, swine flu and — wait for iiiiiiiit! — ebola! Which, you may have noticed, is also a pretty serious problem right now.
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In fact, they specifically cut $250 million from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Global Health Security Program, which ran many of these monitoring programs.
Why did they do that? Because they thought USAID was woke. Because, instead of looking into what it actually did, why it funded the programs it funded, and how those programs also benefited US citizens, Elon Musk and Donald Trump and others saw tweets like Karoline Leavitt’s about how USAID programs were spending “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces, $70,000 for production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru” and decided to kill it. Sure, the descriptions of these programs are inaccurate and the only one actually funded by USAID is the first (the rest were funded by the State Department), but why look into it further?
“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk tweeted back in February of 2025, “Time for it to die.”
Well, now USAID isn’t the only thing dying.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
And now there will be nationwide shortage of Ivermectin because all the rubes bought it to shove up their asses and not use it for I don't know, ELIMINATING PARASITES IN CATTLE?!?
Really, this administration doesn't know shit about fuck.
Hold that thought.
Pestilence is on his phone on twitter starting the rumor that this parasite is cured by self-administered chemotherapy.