06/07/2026
The devastating and financially-exsanguinating New World Screwworm , eradicated for six decades, has now re-emerged on American farms. Is it our fault?
On his first day in office, January 20, 2025, Trump began issuing budget freezes and budget cuts to the US Department of Agriculture programs. These cuts, as well as other major variables like tariffs, put financial burden on US farmers, especially those who made most of their money exporting goods.
US farmers who made a living growing and exporting crops to other countries lost business as global consumers did not want to pay the added tariff cost, severing their business ties to American suppliers. Instead, consumers switched to non-American suppliers. As a result, many Americans lost their farms. In fact, the American Farm Bureau Federation has reported a significant rise in farm bankruptcies in the year 2025 with an estimated loss of 1.865 million farms in the United States .This domino affect left us where we are today.
For decades, we used to fund monitoring programs through the USDA and with Trump‘s budget cuts, this severely hindered our ability to keep up with threats. Today we are seeing the consequences of these actions in Texas with the flesheating screwworm- an insect known to be incredibly devastating to farms and livestock. Even worse, the screwworm is known to infect any warm-blooded mammals, including cats and dogs.
In 2025 we saw the cost of beef go up considerably and they project the screwworm will likely cause those costs to rise again.
Now more domino effect…
We used to export beef to other countries, and now those importers are declining our business, putting their foot down. Sometimes it is beneficial, watching from the outside looking in and not being affected by the same biases that affect American people, especially under this administration.
Countries like Canada, despite the screwworm not being able to survive in their colder climate, wanted to heed caution and banned the import of livestock from the United States.
American farmers have taken note of the president’s patterns of behavior and tendency to shift the blame to others- past and present, When threats of the screwworm were made public, farmers made it clear: this is not Joe Biden’s fault. This is Brooke Rollin’s fault, the head of the US Department of agriculture.
The seemingly benign actions taken by a US president over a year prior, that many of his following cheered on under the guise of “fraud“, has backfired in one of the worst way as possible. The warnings issued by experts around the globe when these cuts began are now coming true.
If these actions are direct result of budget cuts, tariffs, and other actions taken over the past year, can we truly blame Biden for this?
What about Obama?
Kamala?
The Democrats?
Of all the financial turmoil, health coverage crisis, food insufficiency, our ill-preparedness of natural disasters, gas, and oil spikes, cost-of-living spikes, increase in homelessness, catastrophic farm losses, loss of global allies, maternal deaths from lack of care etc…
Is it really logical to follow the president’s lead and blame everybody else when the common denominator in all of this is Trump?
What if we are holding ourselves and more vulnerable Americans to a higher standard than we do our own president? When a toddler makes bad decisions and starts a pattern of blaming others, we correct that child as we want to teach accountability. We know that by continuing to feed into the blame-shifting, and allowing that child to blame others for their own mistakes we are enabling the behavior to continue.
So if lack of accountability is a common characteristic of deceitful people, and we punish kindergartners for lying and blaming others, why are we not holding our president accountable? Why are we feeding into the narrative that it is always someone else’s fault?
Is this domino effect of destruction, a product of our own mistakes? Have we been enabling these bad decisions to continue? Perhaps now is a good time to stop making excuses for a grown man who can buy himself out of jail time and start standing up for those impacted by his decisions.
