In March 2025, a stop-work order under the Trump administration’s USAID dismantling shuttered a relatively modest monitoring/containment program for New World screwworm (NWS) in Central America — a DOGE-era cut to a monitoring program that helped bring flesh-eating parasitic flies back to U.S. soil for the first time since 1966. This was the kind of program that likely cost in the tens of millions of dollars annually, small change in federal budget terms.

What it’s now costing: The estimates are staggering by comparison:

•USDA estimated a comparable outbreak today could cost Texas producers about $733 million annually and reduce economic activity by roughly $1.8 billion in Texas alone.

•If it spreads across the historic range of the pest, a contemporary outbreak of NWS could cost producers $4.3 billion per year and cause a total economic loss of more than $10.6 billion — and that’s before accounting for spread beyond the historic range.

•Separately, an outbreak in Texas alone is estimated to cost U.S. livestock producers approximately $1 billion and cost the general economy $3.7 billion.

Thank you Trump and Republicans for appointing ignoramuses like Musk and Big Balls to fix something they knew nothing about that wasn’t broken in the first place.

ETTD in real time.