Trump’s war on state capacity is coming home to roost

From the screwworm to Ebola and beyond, there’s a price to pay.

America’s ability to respond to disease depends in part on agencies that were targeted by DOGE. (Photo by Samuel Corum via Getty Images)

I read Rachel Carson’s classic, “Silent Spring,” recently, and while it contains plenty of the neopastoral ideas that animate the environmental movement (ideas I broadly disagree with), it also features eco-modernist tendencies. The most striking of these is her brief discussion of a then-new idea for dealing with a cattle pest called the New World screwworm.

The main thrust of the book is that spraying insecticides everywhere is bad. But she mentions that basically everyone agrees that spraying is not a good screwworm solution, because even in places with big screwworm issues there’s not that much bug density. An alternative approach is to raise in captivity a bunch of male screwworms that are then dosed with radiation that renders them sterile. If you flood an area with sterilized males, they out-compete the wild males for access to females and the size of the next generation is greatly reduced.

Carson is enthusiastic about this initiative that she says worked well in Florida and, at the time she wrote the book, is being utilized in an attempt to eradicate the screwworm from the southeastern United States. She suggests that maybe someday it could be expanded to Texas as well, though Texas would be harder because it would always be at risk of re-infiltration from Mexico.

This program proved even more successful than Carson imagined. Not only was the screwworm eliminated from the southwestern United States (a way bigger deal than the Southeast), but from Mexico and Central America as well.

A screwworm barrier was eventually established in southern Panama, a much more defensible frontier, and for decades the screwworm was kept far away from the United States of America.

But this spring in the United States, we’re seeing the first screwworm cases in cattle since the 1960s.

We also had 2,288 cases of measles last year, the most since 1991, and there have been 2,030 cases so far in 2026 — and it’s only June. As a result, America’s status as a country that has eliminated measles is under review. Meanwhile, the Ebola outbreak raging in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is on pace to be the biggest on record.

None of this is “Donald Trump’s fault” in the sense that the spike in global energy prices resulting from his misguided war in the Middle East is his fault.

But with all three issues, his irresponsible policy decisions have made the situation worse. They’re not direct cause-effect fiascos like the Strait of Hormuz, but subtler areas in which sloppiness, erosion of state capacity, naive individualism, and a zero-sum mindset have left the world worse off and jeopardized American interests.

The screwworm saga

The breakdown of screwworm containment started, ironically, right around the time that Sarah Zhang’s profile of the barrier operation in Panama brought new attention to the success of the program.

Zhang’s piece came out in May 2020, just as the Covid pandemic disrupted operations at the facility in Panama where they breed and drop the sterile flies, causing countermeasures to wobble. The pandemic also disrupted surveillance efforts. And in 2021–22, a surge of people began crossing the Darién Gap to try to make asylum claims in the United States — creating a chaotic situation in which it was harder to guard against cattle-smuggling.

By 2023, the successful barrier was breaking down.