WASHINGTON — At a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing earlier this month, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was resolute — her agency was well-prepared for the New World screwworm and had kept it at bay for months before the first case was confirmed in a South Texas calf in early June.
As senators asked whether the U.S. Department of Agriculture needed further resources to combat the parasitic fly and if 2025 department cuts had had any impact on the government's capacity to prepare, Rollins maintained that the federal government, from the White House down, was bought in.
"I walked in the Oval Office and I said sir, there is a pretty serious threat to our livestock that's headed our way, and when we need 500 million sterile flies per week, we're only producing 100 million out of Panama, because everyone took their eye off the ball years ago," Rollins said, describing a conversation with President Donald Trump in the spring of 2025. "And unfortunately, because of the border policies, it's coming our way. And he said, 'Well, what do you need?'"
What Rollins got was $1.3 billion in emergency funding to tackle New World screwworm, which she said has allowed USDA to move quickly to expand its capacity to tackle the problem.
But as the flesh-eating parasite moves into Texas — leaving the state's massive livestock industry and the health of thousands of cattle herds hanging in the balance — stakeholders on both sides of the aisle agree that the country is not producing enough sterile flies to combat the problem. Experts project that 500 to 700 million sterile flies are needed weekly to eradicate the pest, and at the moment, the U.S. government is producing about 100 million every seven days out of a facility in Panama.
That capacity is set to expand, but not enough to reach the 500 million threshold. And other technologies officials hope to pair with fly sterilization are not yet ready to be deployed or are the subject of disagreement, leaving the Trump administration and Texas officials without a speedy path to eradicate the threat.
This reality has set off a blame game in which leaders of both political parties are trying to unpack who's at fault for the lack of capacity. To Rollins, it's on the Biden administration for not prioritizing the screwworm enough and for its more permissive border policies, which she says allowed the pest to travel north through illicit cattle traffic. Democrats have decried her explanation, pointing to DOGE cuts in early 2025, including a significant reduction in USDA staff, as having hampered the agency's efforts to combat the fly.
Rollins' agency has also received criticism from Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, an outgoing Republican, who says the department is focusing on the wrong technology and disregarding his calls to fight the screwworm with an insecticide bait system.
While sterilization is a proven pest control method — releasing sterilized male flies to mate with female flies and produce unfertilized eggs, eventually eliminating the population — some observers view it as a necessity to bring in other technologies while the sterilization effort ramps up.
Currently, the U.S. government is producing about 100 million sterile flies per week out of a facility in Panama. Another facility in Metapa, Mexico is expected to come online at the end of the week, bringing, at the apex of its capacity, 100 million more flies. But it will take time to build up to that figure. USDA officials testified that by the end of July, they expect to produce about 9 million flies per week at the facility.
A domestic facility at Moore Air Base in Edinburg, projected to come online in late 2027, should bring another 100 million when it opens, with an eventual capacity of 300 million sterile flies per week.
As the government races to produce more sterile flies and bring new facilities and technologies online, lawmakers, state officials and ranchers alike are evaluating USDA's response and seeking more information about its preparation, including how willing it is to embrace other tactics.
"The screwworm didn't get here in an hour," Dudley Hoskins, the USDA undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, said at a Texas House hearing last week. "We're not going to be able to push it back south until we get … 500 million sterile flies. It will just take time. It'll take vigilance. It'll take responsiveness."
How USDA responded
The New World screwworm has been on agriculture officials' radar for years, from when the pest breached the Darien Gap in 2023 to when it first appeared in Mexico in late 2024, triggering the Biden administration to suspend live animal imports from the country.
The Trump administration reopened the ports to livestock trade in February 2025, under pressure to bring down beef prices, but shut them down again in May 2025 over screwworm fears.
When Rollins was sworn in as secretary, she said she received a briefing on the screwworm threat within her first two hours on the job, and was told that the fly was expected to reach the U.S. in the summer of 2025.
Early last year, the Trump administration slashed the federal workforce, including at the Department of Agriculture, which lost 20% of its staff. But Rollins has said the staffing cuts had no impact on screwworm response. There were 10 full-time staffers dedicated to screwworm at the onset of the second Trump administration, she said, while there are now more than 120.
"The idea that DOGE caused this could not be further from the truth," Rollins said at a recent news conference. "What we did was reallocate resources and prioritize what matters, ensuring taxpayer dollars are used effectively while leaning in aggressively on preparedness."
In August 2025, Rollins announced a five-part plan to combat screwworm — develop new technologies to accelerate sterile fly production, construct a sterile fly production facility at Moore Air Force Base in Edinburg, ramp up detection and surveillance, collaborate with Mexico and ensure food safety.
Since then, the USDA has broken ground on the $750 million Edinburg facility — expected to come online in late 2027 — and invested in the facility in Metapa, Mexico, to increase its sterile fly production capacity.
Rollins has pushed officials to expedite the timeline on the Edinburg facility, but Hoskins said he doesn't know yet whether it will open before its current projection of November 2027. USDA officials have testified that the process for bringing new facilities online and for dropping flies has gone faster than initially projected.
USDA also does major surveillance and trapping operations along the border and launched a $100 million New World screwworm grant challenge to invest in creative ideas and technologies, and awarded grants from the fund earlier this month, including new trapping technologies and an effort to develop male sterile flies with a hyperactive sex drive.
Rollins and her team have maintained that their actions to this point had delayed the onset of the screwworm for months, given that USDA modeling suggested it would arrive last summer.
Much of the frustration around the response is centered around the gap between how many sterile flies the U.S. is producing and how many it needs.
Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, voiced that very concern after visiting a USDA research facility in Kerrville in the spring of 2025 with farmers and ranchers from his district. He said he told Rollins at the Edinburg facility groundbreaking that the region would not be able to build new facilities fast enough and should be opening pop-up sterile fly production centers and micro-facilities. Gonzalez offered a few empty facilities he knew of that he said could be quickly repurposed.
"We do it for so many other reasons — when we go to war, when we're holding migrants, all different reasons," Gonzalez said. "We can definitely do it to expedite the production of sterile flies to stop the further migration of the screwworm that can have a devastating impact on the industry, on wildlife, and on the economy."
But he's concerned about a lack of communication between the experts on the ground and the administration.
"It's a very slow, bureaucratic process in trying to combat this," Gonzalez said. "They've fumbled the ball in a major way."
On the congressional side, both parties agree it's not a question of resources. Rollins told the Senate committee that there were no additional authorities that her department needed to combat screwworm.
Texas Democrats in Congress want answers from Rollins on a number of inquiries related to USDA's 2025 staff and program cuts to ascertain whether DOGE — Trump's Elon Musk-helmed effort to downsize the federal government — contributed to the outbreak. All 13 Democrats in the state's delegation, led by Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, D-Houston, sent a letter to Rollins last week requesting a briefing.
Other tech options
Stakeholders also want to know about USDA's ability to bring new technologies to the fight. The most promising one is Novofly, a genetically engineered solution to only produce male flies. Successful Novofly adoption would significantly reduce the number of sterile flies required per week, given that the female ones currently produced in labs are not useful in the field.
USDA officials testified that the research stage of the Novofly project is complete, and that it's being operationally field tested but is a ways off from being deployed at the facilities producing sterile flies.
State Rep. Ryan Guillen, R-Rio Grande City, put it succinctly at the hearing: "It seems like we have no idea how fast" Novofly can launch into the field.
Outside of sterile flies, there's high profile-disagreement about another technology: Screwworm Adult Suppression System, or SWASS, an insecticide bait system. Miller, the state agriculture commissioner, has been critical of USDA's focus on sterile flies rather than a SWASS strategy.
"We could have wiped it out," said Miller, who was defeated in his primary last month. "But they wouldn't do it."
In an interview, Miller said he'd provided SWASS research to Rollins and other high-level USDA personnel and met with White House staff last week to attempt to convince them to prioritize fly bait.
Miller believes that SWASS and sterile flies need to be deployed simultaneously and sees Rollins' agency as unwilling to listen and move quickly.
"This bunch, in my opinion, is incompetent," Miller said. "The whole bunch needs to be fired."
But Rollins and USDA have contended that Miller's suggestion is unfeasible, and that SWASS would end up killing sterile flies, undermining that effort. Rollins has called Miller "unserious" and his suggestions "dangerous."
At the end of the day, Rollins and other USDA officials acknowledge that what they need is simply more flies.
"You asked me, sir, how many flies we need," Michael Schmoyer, an official with the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said at the Texas House hearing. "I need more than 100 [million]. 100 is enough to slow it; it's not enough to eradicate it."
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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