It was failing long before this. The border used to be down by Panama.
The doge cuts may affect the future of this program, but have absolutely positively nothing to do with the situation now. Nothing. Not a thing.
It is fine to say doge will make this neglect worse, but the neglect happened for a decade.
And that's important. That's vital to understanding why, and how it happened.
And that is absolutely not a ridiculous concept.
The DOGE cuts directly worsened the current situation. It’s unclear if the initial covid era cuts were performed by Biden or Trump (I can’t find a date or primary source for those).
In a critical time when monitoring and action were desperately needed, we eliminated the agency that'd do that.
If there had been any political will for this things would have been set in motion since 2023, likely even before that when the reports from the scientists working on control started pouring in.
Blaming a few weeks of funding lapse one year into an outbreak in a control project that's been running for decades is absurd.
From a link in this thread: However, since 2023, cases have been increasing in number and spreading north from Panama to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico.
The cost to fight this back will definitely exponentially increase.
So I agree with the commenter that falsified my claim because they are correct, the date of breach was earlier and the time to react was then.