Former Agriculture Officials Say the Trump Administration Missed Screwworm Warnings

Former Agriculture Department officials say the Trump administration was slow to respond to the onset of the New World Screwworm outbreak, despite the administration’s eagerness to blame its predecessor for the growing problem.

“We were really trying to get the attention of folks,” a former senior USDA official who oversaw animal and plant health under President Donald Trump told NOTUS. “That lack of urgency, the lack of understanding about what could happen, was certainly problematic.”

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has argued that the parasite’s northward march through Central America was the direct result of the Biden administration’s “weak foreign policy agenda and failed immigration policies,” a line that many Republican lawmakers have repeated since the first domestic case of screwworm in six decades was confirmed in Zavala County, Texas, last month.

“I think that it’s become a political blame game,” the former official said. “A number of things that Secretary Rollins said are factually incorrect.”

New World Screwworm is a parasitic fly whose larvae feed on living tissue and can kill animals and humans alike if left untreated. The U.S. eradicated screwworm in 1966 using sterile flies, which is still the primary eradication method today. It first reappeared in the U.S. in June and there have now been 31 confirmed cases.

Former department officials say screwworm was at the top of their minds after it was discovered north of the Darien Gap in Panama for the first time since 2006; that was in 2023, during the Biden administration. They said that urgency was not carried over into Trump’s second term.

“We were meeting every single morning and checking in on the status of operations,” a former senior USDA official who helped oversee the agency’s screwworm containment policies under Biden told NOTUS.

Former USDA employees also blamed response failures on program cuts under DOGE, as well as on Trump officials’ lack of trust in both career staff and their counterparts in the Mexican government. The annual USDA outlay to combat screwworm had been roughly $15 million annually, but that funding, along with about $382 million aimed at combating animal-borne illnesses globally, was terminated in March 2025 as part of DOGE’s cost-cutting push.

“It took a long time to convince them — the new administration — that it’s in our best interest to invest in Mexico’s capacity to contain this,” the Biden official said.

The USDA did not respond to questions from NOTUS about previous funding delays or which specific policies under Biden enabled the screwworm’s arrival in the U.S.

Rollins has claimed that the Biden administration did not provide funding to fight screwworm and that only 10 people worked on the issue, which former employees dispute. The office of Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service lost 2,009 employees — 23% of its workforce — between January 2025 and January 2026.

DOGE also paused plans for a sterile fly production facility in Mexico that the Biden administration had authorized in 2024 as part of a $165 million emergency package. Rollins has acknowledged that the 100 million sterile flies produced weekly by the USDA and the Agriculture Department of Panama at a facility in Central America are far short of the 400 million or 500 million needed.

“It really set us back quite a bit, and really inhibited our ability to keep the pace,” the former APHIS official said.

The former USDA officials argued that the Biden administration’s public actions undercut Rollins’ claims. On the Friday before Trump’s inauguration, Biden Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack sent a letter to Mexico’s secretary of agriculture, Julio Antonio Berdegué, explaining what was needed from Mexico before live animal trade and imports could resume. Vilsack also approved the transfer of $100 million in funds to increase sterile fly production in December 2023 and another $165 million a year later.

The Biden administration closed southern ports of entry to live cattle imports after Mexican officials confirmed the first screwworm case in Chiapas in November 2024. The Trump administration reversed that decision in February 2025 under pressure from the cattle industry, then reinstated the restrictions this May as cases continued to spread northward.

USDA officials say the total number of documented cases of screwworm is probably an undercount, as there are no recorded detections in wildlife so far, only in domestic animals. The former officials said this is due to a lack of tracking and finding, not because wildlife hasn’t been affected.

“We’re going to be playing catch-up for a long time,” said the Biden official who oversaw the response.