Dana Milbank: Who Caused the Screwworm Outbreak? Joe Biden, Of Course.

The screwworm has turned.

Days after the Trump administration took office in 2025, it reopened livestock trade across the southern border, reversing a ban the Biden administration had put in place to prevent the New World screwworm from spreading to U.S. herds.

Around the same time, Trump’s DOGE operation, as part of its dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, eliminated funding for efforts to monitor and contain the flesh-eating insect’s spread in Central America, the trade publication Agri-Pulse reported at the time.

Now — surprise! — the screwworm has begun infesting Texas cattle. And even Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, described by President Trump as a “MAGA Warrior,” complained last week about the ineffective efforts by Trump’s Agriculture Department.

“For months, the screwworm has advanced rapidly through Mexico in spite of the USDA’s existing gameplan,” he said in a statement, adding that the department “missed an important component” in screwworm prevention and “the consequences of that decision are now staring us in the face.”

The screwworm screwup would seem to offer a cautionary tale about what happens when you sabotage government. But the Trump administration has come up with an alternative explanation: It’s Joe Biden’s fault.

“The Biden administration’s open-border policies,” Trump Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins testified before the Senate Agriculture Committee on Wednesday, helped the “screwworm to move north for the first time in 50 years, beginning in 2022.”

“How did the last USDA watch it coming for years?” she demanded. “Why did no one do anything about it until we walked in the door in January and February of last year? It is a question that I still don’t understand.”

It seems a bit of a long shot to convince the public that Biden is responsible for a bug first found here 17 months after he left office. But a couple of Republicans on the panel were willing to attempt that flight of fancy.

“It’s important to point out that we saw this coming under the previous administration and they refused to respond,” declared Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas. He said migrants brought the screwworm here, perhaps on their pets or on themselves. “I saw so many of these people with open flesh wounds,” he alleged. “That could have been one way to get it across the border.”

Screwworm smugglers!

Give Republicans points for ingenuity. But the country, not to mention the political fortunes of the president’s party, would be in a much better place if they spent half as much time addressing Americans’ problems as blaming others for them.

In the House, the Republican majority is so slim that it can vanish on any given day depending on attendance. The legislative process has broken down so completely that lawmakers now routinely circumvent GOP leaders with “discharge petitions,” in which small numbers of Republicans join Democrats to bring bills to the floor.

Last week, 18 Republicans joined Democrats in approving support for Ukraine’s war efforts. This week, 20 Republicans defied their leaders to support a pro-labor bill. Next up may be a discharge petition to block Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund. Seven such efforts have gathered enough signatures to sideline leaders — a record.

The only thing that seems to unite the fractious conference at the moment is members’ shared vendetta against all things Democratic.

The Trump Justice Department, as part of its harassment of the president’s opponents, is prosecuting the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights group, and is investigating ActBlue, the leading Democratic fundraising arm. This week, House Republicans hauled both groups before committees for further hazing.

On Tuesday, Rep. Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee had SPLC chief Bryan Fair at the witness table, ostensibly to talk about the organization’s use of paid informants in extremist groups. But it quickly devolved into a forum for Republican lawmakers and witnesses from conservative groups to take turns trashing the SPLC as, among other things, a “political hit operation” that believes “it’s OK to cut a boy’s penis off.”

The farce continued Wednesday, when Jordan and colleagues hectored ActBlue chief Regina Wallace-Jones (“How much fraud is too much fraud?” Jordan asked). She responded by taking the Fifth — and Democrats vowed to give the same treatment to WinRed, the Republican fundraising arm, when they return to power.

The screwworm scrum is now following the same familiar script. Rollins, unwilling to admit her administration’s missteps or to acknowledge that climate change may make the northward spread of such tropical pests inevitable, instead manufactured a way to blame Biden. “The threat … was the direct result of the Biden-Harris Admin’s WEAK foreign policy agenda and FAILED immigration policies,” she posted on X.

She picked up the dubious theme in her testimony. “I was sort of shocked that the last USDA really had no plans, hadn’t really done anything,” Rollins told the Agriculture Committee.

She boasted that the Trump administration “closed the ports a year ago” to cattle coming from Mexico — without mentioning that the Trump administration was the one that had opened the ports a few months earlier. And she said the administration has repurposed $1.3 billion and 110 people for work on screwworms.

“The president has been very clear, this is a nonpartisan issue,” she assured Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, which has already had a screwworm case.

As if there were such a thing as a nonpartisan issue to this administration. When Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, asked about a delay in rulemaking affecting poultry farmers, Rollins replied: “Sir, obviously that was a Biden rule.”

And when Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, asked about people in his state who can’t afford groceries, she shot back: “That’s because of the Biden administration.”

“Two years later, that’s your answer?” Warnock asked. “Because of the Biden administration?”

That, senator, is always the answer.

Dana Milbank is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.