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Elon Musk’s so‑called “Department of Government Efficiency” cut an effective screwworm monitoring program to “save” about $15 million a year — and within a year we’re staring down a screwworm crisis the USDA now expects to cost over a billion dollars to contain. That’s not efficiency, that’s sabotage.Now we have confirmed screwworm cases in U.S. livestock and pets for the first time in about 60 years, and USDA is scrambling to rebuild capacity, rushing sterile fly facilities in Mexico and Texas and throwing more than a billion dollars at a problem we already knew how to prevent. This is what happens when you put a billionaire with no public‑health background and no respect for science in charge of hunting for cuts: he doesn’t see safeguards, he sees “inconvenient” line items that get in the way of his ideology and his bottom line.And let’s be clear: DOGE was never just about “efficiency.” Trump’s order gave Musk’s operation sweeping access to federal data systems under the guise of streamlining government, with reports that DOGE‑linked operatives reached into sensitive databases at agencies like Social Security, OPM, Treasury, and Education. They were perfectly willing to ignore privacy protections that have been on the books for 50 years — but when it came to a relatively tiny $15 million program that protected ranchers, rural communities, and the broader economy, suddenly that’s where they “tightened belts.”This isn’t fiscal conservatism, it’s deliberate cruelty dressed up as cost‑cutting. The programs they kill are always the same ones: the ones that regulate corporate power, protect ordinary people, or quietly prevent the next catastrophe. And when the crisis hits — when cattle and goats in Texas and pets in New Mexico start turning up with a parasite we supposedly eradicated generations ago — they point fingers at anyone but themselves.