Dear Editor,
In 1966, the United States was declared totally free of screwworm infestation, a terrible scourge of livestock. In early 2025, under the term of Donald Trump's Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, the USAID program for the monitoring and control and tracking of the spread of screwworms in central America was totally terminated.
This program was one of the reasons we had been free of screwworms for 60 years. Also, under her term in early 2025, the USDA's Animal & Plant Health Inspector Service lost one-fourth of its work force. One of the responsibilities of APHIS was to do inspections to help prevent screwworms from entering the United States. This was another program that helped keep us free of screwworms. And in February of 2025, Rollins allowed the importation of live cattle from Mexico, which increased the chances of screwworms entering the United States.
At the time, none of our Trump-enabling congressmen raised any objections to any of these three acts. In fact, Senator Roger Marshall praised the termination of the USAID program, calling it wasteful and fraudulent (he has not called the gold-gilding of statues in DC wasteful).
Now, after 60 years, we have a screwworm infestation in Texas. The response of Secretary Rollins and Marshall has been to blame Biden. Our Trump-enabling congressmen are all praising Secretary Rollins for now stopping the importation of the cattle, which she authorized, and they are all calling for more funding and action to stop the infestations when they stayed silent when the preventative programs were terminated or reduced.
Four of these congressmen: Marshall, Mann, Estes & Schmidt, are up for reelection in November. When you go to vote, remember what they did and did not do.
Ron Svaty
Ellsworth