I want you to read the following sentence and tell me, honestly, that it sounds like a good use of your tax dollars:
That is not a parody. That is what your government was doing. For sixty years. And when DOGE came along and looked at the federal budget with the eyes of people who actually understand efficiency, they saw a line item that said breed irradiated flies and airdrop them into Central America, and they did what any rational person would do. They cut it. In March 2025, as part of the dissolution of USAID's overseas grant portfolio, the screwworm monitoring and containment program was eliminated, along with approximately $382 million in other global animal disease programs that sounded exactly as ridiculous as they were.
Fourteen months later, the New World screwworm is back in the United States for the first time since 1966. As of mid-June 2026, there are twelve or more confirmed cases across Texas and New Mexico. A three-week-old calf in Zavala County. A goat in Gillespie County. A dog in Lea County, New Mexico. The press is treating this as a catastrophe. The Democrats are treating it as a vindication. Rep. Pramila Jayapal told reporters: "Trump and Musk's DOGE 'saved' $15 million by cutting a program dedicated to preventing the spread of screwworm. Now, there's an outbreak infecting our beef and the administration is spending $1 billion."
And I would like to explain why she is wrong, and why the $15 million was, in fact, a steal, and why what is happening now is not a failure but a success that the left is too economically illiterate to recognize.
Let me describe what your government was doing, because I think the details matter. The USDA was operating a facility that bred screwworm flies. Millions of them. They then irradiated the males with cobalt-60 until they were sterile. Then they loaded them into planes and flew over Panama and dropped them. The theory was that the sterile males would mate with wild females, producing no offspring, and the population would collapse. This had to be done continuously, week after week, hundreds of millions of flies, because if you stopped, the screwworms would come back.
And it worked. It worked for sixty years. The United States had not had a domestic screwworm case since 1966. And the cost was only $15 million a year, which, according to the American Farm Bureau, was saving American farmers approximately $1.3 billion annually in prevented livestock losses.
But here is what the defenders of the program never want to talk about: it sounded insane. Breeding flies. Irradiating flies. Dropping flies out of airplanes. Into the jungle. Forever. If you described this program to a normal person at a barbecue, they would assume you were joking, and if you told them it cost $15 million a year they would be angry, and if you told them it was saving $1.3 billion they would say "sure it is" in the same voice they use when their brother-in-law explains his cryptocurrency portfolio. The program had the aesthetic of government waste even though it was, by any rational measure, the single most cost-effective program in the history of the federal government. And that is exactly why it had to go.
The press wants you to focus on the following comparison, so let me present it honestly and then explain why it does not mean what they think it means:
Yes, the administration cut a $15 million program and is now spending $1 billion on an emergency response. Yes, the emergency response involves building a new facility in Texas to breed sterile flies and release them from airplanes, which is the same program they cut, but sixty-seven times more expensive. And yes, the new facility will not be operational until the end of 2027, which means there will be approximately eighteen months of active screwworm infestation in American cattle before the replacement for the program they cancelled begins to function.
The Democrats see this and say: you broke it and now we're all paying for it. I see it and I say: this is how real business works.
Think about what actually happened here. The administration identified an existing program. They cut it. The thing the program was preventing came back. They then announced a new program, at dramatically higher cost, to solve the problem the old program had already been solving. And the new program is being framed not as a replacement for the thing they broke but as a bold emergency response to an unforeseen crisis.
This is not incompetence. This is a leveraged buyout of a crisis. You take a $15 million asset, strip it for parts, let the underlying operation collapse, and then recapitalize at $1 billion with yourself as the hero. Private equity has been doing this to hospitals and newspapers for decades. The administration has simply applied the model to the national livestock supply. And I will not apologize for finding this elegant, because it is. Secretary Rollins herself has stated the administration has invested over $1 billion to combat the screwworm, and she said it with the pride of someone who is solving a problem, and not the shame of someone who created the problem, and that confidence is worth something.
This is the same strategic brilliance DOGE showed with the trans mice. The NIH was spending $532,000 on a University of Michigan grant to study the effects of cross-sex hormones in mouse models, and $33,000 on feminizing hormone therapy in male rats. Seven grants, cancelled by DOGE, celebrated by the administration as proof of "shady expenditures." The House Committee on Oversight and Reform even held a hearing titled "Transgender Lab Rats and Poisoned Puppies." And the total savings? A few hundred thousand dollars. From a research portfolio studying how hormones affect cardiovascular disease and cancer. But the savings were visible. They were describable. You could fit them in a tweet. DOGE posted: "Yesterday, @NIH cancelled seven grants for transgender experiments on animals." That tweet performed better than any amount of prevented cancer ever could. That is value creation. The screwworm cut is the same play at a different scale.
I should address the beef, because this is where the economically illiterate lose the plot entirely.
Beef prices are up 20 to 35 percent. The cattle herd is at a 75-year low. Canada has blocked Texas livestock imports. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller has said the state will "likely be infested in six months." The American Prospect ran a piece headlined "Why That Next Hamburger Is Going to Cost You." The press is treating this as a consequence of the program cuts.
And maybe it is. But here is what the press is not telling you: expensive beef is not a crisis. Expensive beef is a market signal. It means demand exceeds supply. It means the product is valued. When a tech startup's valuation goes up because supply is constrained, we call that scarcity premium and we celebrate it. When beef does the same thing because flesh-eating parasites are consuming the cattle herd from the inside, we call it a disaster. The inconsistency is staggering.
Former APHIS administrator Kevin Shea told the press that "this administration came in so skeptical of the career people, they didn't really want to listen." He also noted that the delay in funding Mexico's sterile fly facility was "most likely caught up in the whole DOGE thing. It probably looked like some sort of foreign aid." And yes, a program that drops irradiated flies into foreign jungles does look like foreign aid. That is the problem with programs that work quietly for sixty years. They start to look unnecessary. The screwworms have now made the case for the program more persuasively than sixty years of prevented outbreaks ever could. You're welcome.
The USDA has lost approximately 1,900 APHIS employees since January 2025. APHIS is the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. These are the people who inspect animals, monitor for disease, and maintain the quarantine infrastructure that keeps things like screwworms on the other side of the border.
The press calls this "gutting." I call it streamlining. And I acknowledge that the streamlining has coincided with the return of a flesh-eating parasite that the previous staffing level had successfully kept out of the country for six decades. But correlation is not causation, and anyway, the remaining staff are now handling a genuine crisis, which means they are operating at peak efficiency. Nothing motivates a government employee like a flesh-eating emergency. This is what a lean operation looks like.
The CDC has activated a Level 3 emergency response. The USDA has announced the construction of a new sterile fly breeding facility at Moore Air Base in Edinburg, Texas, expected to produce 300 million sterile flies per week when operational. Sterile pupae are already arriving. Aerial dispersal flights have begun. Thirteen Texas counties are under quarantine. The administration has committed over $1 billion.
And here is what I need you to notice: the emergency response is the same program they cut. It is breeding flies. Irradiating them. Dropping them from airplanes. The only differences are that it is being done domestically instead of in Panama, it costs sixty-seven times more, it won't be fully operational for eighteen months, and it is being described as a "bold investment" rather than "routine maintenance." Those four differences are the difference between waste and leadership. The $15 million program was waste because it was old and quiet and worked. The $1 billion program is leadership because it is new and loud and necessary, and it is necessary because they cut the old one.
The doctrine, stated plainly:
The United States government maintained a program for sixty years that cost $15 million annually, saved $1.3 billion annually, and kept a flesh-eating parasite out of the country by dropping irradiated sterile flies into the Panamanian jungle. DOGE cut it because it sounded absurd. Fourteen months later the parasite is back, beef prices are up 35%, the cattle herd is at a 75-year low, and the administration is spending $1 billion to build a new facility that does the same thing the old program did. The press calls this a debacle. I call it a proof of concept. The old program was so good at preventing the crisis that nobody believed the crisis was real. Now they believe it. Now they will fund it. They will fund it at sixty-seven times the cost, and the man who cut the original program will stand in front of the new facility and cut a ribbon, and nobody will ask him why the ribbon needed cutting in the first place. This is how value is created in America. You destroy something invisible, let the consequences become visible, then spend dramatically more to rebuild it with your name on it. Elon Musk saved fifteen million dollars. It will cost a billion to fix. The fifteen million was a steal.