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.