The Screwworm Is Back. The Agency That Beat It Lost a Fifth of Its Staff.

The United States declared itself free of New World screwworm — a housefly-sized parasite whose larvae eat living flesh — in 1966, after decades of releasing sterilized male flies until the population collapsed.▸ That barrier held for sixty years, pushed south to Panama's Darién Gap and maintained there by a joint U.S.-Panama facility. In November 2024 the parasite reached southern Mexico. On June 3, 2026, it reached a three-week-old calf in Zavala County, Texas — the first domestically acquired U.S. case since eradication. By this week the Texas Animal Health Commission had confirmed cases on 24 premises across 13 counties and placed 22 counties under animal-movement restrictions. The outbreak arrives testing two things at once: how much a re-established screwworm population would cost, and whether the federal agency responsible for stopping it still has the people to do so.

The last time screwworm got loose in Texas, in 1976, the USDA estimates it cost livestock producers $732 million and the state's broader economy $1.8 billion, in 2024 dollars — figures reported by the Congressional Research Service.▸ That outbreak was eradicated. The current one is still spreading, into a much smaller herd: the U.S. cattle inventory stood at 86.2 million head on January 1, 2026, per USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service — reported by Drovers as the smallest herd in nearly 75 years. Texas A&M AgriLife Extension put a conservative price on what full establishment would cost Texas alone: $2.1 billion to the cattle industry and $9 billion to the state's hunting and wildlife industry, which screwworm also infests. Cattle and calves are already Texas's single largest agricultural commodity by cash receipts, per USDA NASS Texas statistics.

Against that exposure, the existing barrier system has a specific, quantified payoff.▸ APHIS funds 90% of the Panama-U.S. sterile-fly barrier (COPEG) and estimated in 2025 that the investment saves the U.S. cattle industry $2.3 billion annually by keeping screwworm south of Central America. That barrier is what just failed to hold.

Since the parasite crossed into Mexico, USDA has committed money in five separate actions — emergency funding to keep the existing barrier running, then new capital to build capacity the country hasn't needed since the 1980s.

The two Commodity Credit Corporation transfers — $109.8 million in FY2023 and $165 million in FY2024 — kept the Panama barrier and border surveillance running as Mexican case counts climbed.▸ The $21 million Metapa transfer converts an existing fruit-fly plant in southern Mexico into sterile screwworm-fly production. The $105 million Grand Challenge, which drew 226 applications requesting a combined $664 million, funds 40 competitively selected research and response projects. The largest single line is new capital: a $610 million firm-fixed-price contract, awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to M.A. Mortenson Co. in March 2026, to build the first domestic sterile-fly production facility since the U.S. shut its last one in 1982 — at Moore Air Base in Edinburg, Texas, targeting 100 million flies a week by late 2027 and 300 million a week eventually.

None of that capital spending was in motion when the DRP buyout hit.▸ Between January and March 2025, APHIS lost roughly 20% of its staff — more than 1,600 employees — to the federal government's Deferred Resignation Program, per National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition analysis of Office of Personnel Management data. More than 63% of the separations NSAC tracked across USDA's inspection agencies came from the "investigations group" that includes field inspectors — the job category most directly tied to catching an outbreak early. Whether that specific loss weakened the screwworm response is disputed: former USDA officials told Agri-Pulse the cuts complicated the response, particularly through the loss of experienced veterinarians, while independent scientists cautioned the northward spread traces to Mexico's November 2024 case and was, in one expert's word, "inevitable" regardless of staffing — a dispute laid out in FactCheck.org's review of both claims.

What isn't disputed is the scale of what's being rebuilt in response.▸ After the first Texas case, Gov. Greg Abbott's office announced a cooperative agreement with APHIS Veterinary Services funding 15 new term positions at the Texas Animal Health Commission — 10 field inspectors plus emergency-management and epidemiology specialists.

Fifteen positions is a real, if narrow, response to an outbreak already spread across 13 counties.▸ It is not, on its own, a reversal of a 1,600-person reduction — it is a state agency hiring at the edge of a national workforce contraction that happened somewhere else, a year earlier, for reasons unrelated to any single pest.

Case and quarantine counts are current as of the Texas Animal Health Commission's most recent update at time of writing and will have moved by the time you read this; the funding and staffing figures are fixed historical actions and won't.