This is an adapted excerpt from the June 11 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Flesh-eating bugs are plaguing the country. For basically the first time in 60 years, screwworm flies are popping up in farms across the American Southwest. As of now, there are a handful of confirmed cases in Texas and New Mexico, but there will almost certainly be more.
Now, if you are not a cattle rancher, the possibility of flesh-eating screwworms terrorizing American farms was likely not on your radar. That’s because when the government is doing its job — when the obscure bureaucrats who work tirelessly throughout the continent to assess risk and mitigate harm are left unimpeded, as had been the case for decades — you don’t have to worry about it.
If you are not a cattle rancher, the possibility of flesh-eating screwworms terrorizing American farmers was likely not on your radar.
The screwworm is a great example. An infestation can be absolutely devastating not just for individual animals and farms, but for the entire agriculture industry. These are flesh-eating parasites that lay their eggs in open wounds in animals, often cattle. They spread rapidly and can eradicate an entire farm’s worth of livestock. Hundreds, even thousands of these maggots can gather in one wound, and the consequences are often fatal for any mammal.
It was a huge problem throughout the American Southwest in the early to mid-20th century. And after extensive research and cooperation between the government and ranchers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture came up with an ingenious solution to eradicate the screwworm. Basically, the USDA would sterilize the males and release them into affected areas, because if enough males couldn’t reproduce, the population would eventually die out.
Now, on its face that plan may sound silly. The government wanted to spend a bunch of money to study the sex lives of insects. No one knew if it was going to work when they started. And it was not lost on the USDA scientists that this was the kind of thing that right-wingers could pounce on.
During a 2000 interview, Edward F. Knipling, a USDA researcher who helped devise the plan, spoke about the caution the agency practiced to avoid public scrutiny from those who would claim it was “wasting money.”
“Especially since this had to do with sexual behavior, we knew that if the media got ahold of that, they could make quite a deal out of this idea of controlling an insect by sterilizing the males and releasing them,” he continued. “So we didn’t say much about running this experiment.”
Thankfully, Knipling was allowed to continue and even expand his work.
Through sterilization and strict monitoring, we had a bubble of safety from these pests that stretched all the way down to Panama. So the problem was eradicated from this country for more than half a century.
Then Donald Trump became president for the second time, and he tasked Elon Musk with slashing the federal budget. Musk and his small gang of 20-somethings took their “chain saw” to the entire federal bureaucracy, cutting funds for programs like Ebola virus prevention and containment. (They had to undo that one.)
When you think about it, screwworm eradication is precisely the kind of thing that conservatives, and Musk in particular, would try to gut. In fact, in June of last year, the right-wing outlet Newsmax called for him to kill this exact program: “A government agency spending $300 million in taxpayer dollars to produce sterilized flies sounds like a dream scenario for a DOGE team looking to cut waste, fraud and abuse.”