Flesh-Eating Maggot Arrives In Texas: Inside the Bipartisan Effort to Stop It

New World Screwworm threatens to decimate Texas livestock and set back the economy by nearly $4 billion. Can Republicans and Democrats unite to stop the spread?

There's a flesh-eating maggot chewing its way through livestock in South Texas right now. And against all odds, it's pulling off something incredible: getting Republicans and Democrats to work together.

The last major nationwide screwworm outbreak in the U.S. occurred between 1972 and 1976, infesting tens of thousands of livestock and costing producers tens of millions of dollars at the time — roughly $730 million today, adjusted for inflation. 

Despite the name, the New World Screwworm isn’t actually a worm. It's the larva of a fly about the size of a common housefly. The female lays her eggs in the open wound or orifice of any warm-blooded animal (cattle, deer, your dog, in extremely rare cases, even you) and when those eggs hatch, the larvae burrow in and start eating. Not dead flesh, like a respectable maggot. Living flesh. A single infestation can kill a 1,000-pound cow in about two weeks.

The U.S. wiped out the screwworm back in 1966 by breeding billions of sterile male flies and chucking them out of airplanes. A female screwworm only mates once in her life, so if her hubby is infertile, the whole population collapses. We bred and dropped over 94 billion of them between 1962 and 1975, creating a "fly wall" down in Panama.

Then, late in 2024, the bugs slipped past the wall (experts blame the comeback on illegal cattle smuggling by Central American crime groups) and started marching north. In June 2026, the first Texas case in decades turned up in a three-week-old calf near the border.

Now for the part that makes ranchers sweat through their Wranglers. Texas is the nation's number-one cattle state: 12 million cattle and calves, roughly 15% of all American beef. A full-blown outbreak could cost livestock producers about $1 billion a year and ding the broader economy by $3.7 billion. All while beef prices are already at record highs. Love that for us.

And wouldn't you know it, the blame game kicked off immediately. The left points at the Trump administration for gutting a USAID program that monitored the screwworm and firing the very workers paid to track it. The right points at Biden-era border policies and Mexican cartels for letting it sneak through in the first place.

But the finger-pointing hasn't stopped a bipartisan response. Because when billions of dollars and the nation's hamburger supply are on the line, there's no time to argue about whose fault it is. Texas Republicans John Cornyn and Ted Cruz teamed up with New Mexico Democrats Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján to push the STOP Screwworms Act. Forty-three lawmakers from both parties signed a letter directing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to build a domestic sterile fly production facility.

The problem? We're currently cranking out about 110 million sterile flies a week. But we need 400 to 500 million. Until a mega-facility comes online, we're basically bringing a squirt gun to a wildfire.

To bridge the current deficit, the USDA is building a $750 million domestic mega-facility at Moore Air Base in Edinburg, Texas, which began operations earlier this year and will produce 300 million flies a week by late 2027. The USDA is also building additional facilities in Mexico, some of which will be online as early as this summer.

But here's the thing worth chewing on (sorry). A literal flesh-eating parasite reminded us that when the house is actually on fire, we still remember how to grab a bucket together.

— Alex Buscemi (abuscemi@buildersmovement.org)

Art by Matthew Lewis

Help turn common ground into real change. In a world where extremists seek to divide for power and profit, Builders take action to unite, create, and bring light to the world. Support the development of new media, tools, and platforms to help us give the power back to the people.

👉 Support the Builders Movement