In which the efficiency experts save fifteen million dollars and spend a billion finding out what the fifteen million was for.
Here is a sentence to tattoo on the inside of every libertarian’s eyelids: the Department of Government Efficiency saved fifteen million dollars by killing the screwworm program, and the bill for that thrift is now running north of a billion.
Do the math slowly, the way they teach it at the business schools these geniuses dropped out of. Fifteen million in. A billion-plus out. Beef up better than twenty percent. That is not a budget cut. That is a payday loan with a flesh-eating interest rate.
Back up, because the screwworm deserves a proper introduction. It is a fly larva that burrows into the living tissue of a warm-blooded animal, then widens the wound so it can invite its friends, then eats the host alive while the host is still standing there trying to use its own body. We beat this thing decades ago. Some unglamorous federal lifers figured out you could breed millions of sterile flies, dump them over the countryside, let them mate to nowhere, and starve the species off the continent one barren generation at a time. It worked. We pushed the bug all the way down to Panama and parked a wall of sterile males across the isthmus. Cost: about fifteen million a year. Savings to American ranchers: somewhere around eight hundred million a year in 1996 dollars, which is closer to one-point-seven billion today. The single best return on investment in the federal ledger, and it was sitting there quietly doing its job, asking for nothing, the way the competent never get on television.
Then came the chainsaw. You remember the chainsaw — held aloft on a stage, the richest man on Earth and his gang of twenty-two-year-olds promising to root out waste. And what is more wasteful, to a mind like that, than three hundred million dollars’ worth of government bugs? Newsmax had practically taken out an ad asking them to kill it. So they killed it. March of last year. Filed it under efficiency and went looking for the next antiseptic to throw out.
You can guess the rest, because the larvae could. The bugs came north. A dozen-plus infections in the States now, the things chewing toward Texas and New Mexico, the ports slammed shut, flung open in February, slammed shut again in May, the whole border policy run like a screen door in a hurricane. And the official explanation, delivered with a straight face, is that this is Joe Biden’s screwworm — that it rode up here on the flesh of migrants, as if the bug needed a coyote and not the unlocked door we personally unbolted after guarding it for sixty years.
So we spent a week down here trying to identify the screwworm. Turns out we were looking in the wrong wound.
Because consider the definition. A parasite is an organism that fastens onto a healthy host, contributes nothing, consumes the living tissue, and widens the wound to invite more of its own kind — feeding right up to the moment the host collapses, by which point it has already laid its eggs in the next one. Read that twice. Then look at who runs this government.
Look at the Mango Mussolini, who treats the United States Treasury like a personal feedbag and the rule of law like a thing that happens to other people. Look at the world’s richest man, who took a literal chainsaw to the one program standing between you and a maggot in your ribeye, billed it as savings, and is now — conveniently, parasitically — somewhere else, off the host, eggs already laid, posting through it. That’s the genius of the real screwworm. It never wants you dead. Dead host, no more meals. It wants you alive and diminished and infested and billable, paying a billion for the surgery and twenty percent more for the steak and listening, the whole time, to a man explain that the hole in your side is the previous tenant’s fault.
Fifteen million was the antiseptic. They threw it out to look thrifty in front of the cameras, and the wound has been widening ever since, exactly the way the wound is designed to.
But here is the thing about the old eradication method, and the reason I’d ask you to hold it in your head until roughly November: it works by overwhelming the zone with sterile males. Flies that look the part and make all the noise and cannot, when it counts, reproduce a single thing. Mate with them and you get nothing — no eggs, no larvae, no next generation gnawing you from the inside. We built entire facilities on this principle. We pushed an entire species to the bottom of a continent with it.
We just forgot, somewhere around last March, that the technique was never really about flies.
Vote like a sterile-fly program. Flood the zone. Give the parasites nothing to breed with.
Winston Churchill once said that if you were not a liberal when you were young you had no heart, and if you were not a conservative when you were older then you had no brain. I know I have both so what does that make me?
Blame it on Rio
The Real Screwworm:
In which the efficiency experts save fifteen million dollars and spend a billion finding out what the fifteen million was for.
Here is a sentence to tattoo on the inside of every libertarian’s eyelids: the Department of Government Efficiency saved fifteen million dollars by killing the screwworm program, and the bill for that thrift is now running north of a billion.
Do the math slowly, the way they teach it at the business schools these geniuses dropped out of. Fifteen million in. A billion-plus out. Beef up better than twenty percent. That is not a budget cut. That is a payday loan with a flesh-eating interest rate.
Back up, because the screwworm deserves a proper introduction. It is a fly larva that burrows into the living tissue of a warm-blooded animal, then widens the wound so it can invite its friends, then eats the host alive while the host is still standing there trying to use its own body. We beat this thing decades ago. Some unglamorous federal lifers figured out you could breed millions of sterile flies, dump them over the countryside, let them mate to nowhere, and starve the species off the continent one barren generation at a time. It worked. We pushed the bug all the way down to Panama and parked a wall of sterile males across the isthmus. Cost: about fifteen million a year. Savings to American ranchers: somewhere around eight hundred million a year in 1996 dollars, which is closer to one-point-seven billion today. The single best return on investment in the federal ledger, and it was sitting there quietly doing its job, asking for nothing, the way the competent never get on television.
Then came the chainsaw. You remember the chainsaw — held aloft on a stage, the richest man on Earth and his gang of twenty-two-year-olds promising to root out waste. And what is more wasteful, to a mind like that, than three hundred million dollars’ worth of government bugs? Newsmax had practically taken out an ad asking them to kill it. So they killed it. March of last year. Filed it under efficiency and went looking for the next antiseptic to throw out.
You can guess the rest, because the larvae could. The bugs came north. A dozen-plus infections in the States now, the things chewing toward Texas and New Mexico, the ports slammed shut, flung open in February, slammed shut again in May, the whole border policy run like a screen door in a hurricane. And the official explanation, delivered with a straight face, is that this is Joe Biden’s screwworm — that it rode up here on the flesh of migrants, as if the bug needed a coyote and not the unlocked door we personally unbolted after guarding it for sixty years.
So we spent a week down here trying to identify the screwworm. Turns out we were looking in the wrong wound.
Because consider the definition. A parasite is an organism that fastens onto a healthy host, contributes nothing, consumes the living tissue, and widens the wound to invite more of its own kind — feeding right up to the moment the host collapses, by which point it has already laid its eggs in the next one. Read that twice. Then look at who runs this government.
Look at the Mango Mussolini, who treats the United States Treasury like a personal feedbag and the rule of law like a thing that happens to other people. Look at the world’s richest man, who took a literal chainsaw to the one program standing between you and a maggot in your ribeye, billed it as savings, and is now — conveniently, parasitically — somewhere else, off the host, eggs already laid, posting through it. That’s the genius of the real screwworm. It never wants you dead. Dead host, no more meals. It wants you alive and diminished and infested and billable, paying a billion for the surgery and twenty percent more for the steak and listening, the whole time, to a man explain that the hole in your side is the previous tenant’s fault.
Fifteen million was the antiseptic. They threw it out to look thrifty in front of the cameras, and the wound has been widening ever since, exactly the way the wound is designed to.
But here is the thing about the old eradication method, and the reason I’d ask you to hold it in your head until roughly November: it works by overwhelming the zone with sterile males. Flies that look the part and make all the noise and cannot, when it counts, reproduce a single thing. Mate with them and you get nothing — no eggs, no larvae, no next generation gnawing you from the inside. We built entire facilities on this principle. We pushed an entire species to the bottom of a continent with it.
We just forgot, somewhere around last March, that the technique was never really about flies.
Vote like a sterile-fly program. Flood the zone. Give the parasites nothing to breed with.
The host would like its tissue back.
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About 34orion
Winston Churchill once said that if you were not a liberal when you were young you had no heart, and if you were not a conservative when you were older then you had no brain. I know I have both so what does that make me?