If you’ve thus far been fortunate enough to avoid the soul-crushing experience of a bed bug infestation, you really don’t know how lucky you are. There’s no way to truly understand how their invasion, removal, and subsequent state of hypervigilance they inspire can break the mind of a once sane individual without going through that hell yourself.
In 2010, New York City faced a biblical epidemic of the little bastards—the first of its magnitude in the digital age. With the city gripped in fear, news outlets from indie to legacy reported on the outbreak as if they were covering a war. A couple years and hundreds of discarded mattresses later, the horde’s numbers had been diminished by half. But bedbugs were never fully eradicated in New York. In fact, they continued to spread far and wide. And now, as travel season looms, their numbers are surging once more.
To help combat these and other such insect epidemics, the federal government has wisely set up an agency within the USDA called the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). But in a cruel twist of irony that “was lost on no one,” according to an employee who spoke with the nonprofit news site NOTUS, the organization tasked with defending us from these bugs has been invaded by them.
The George Washington Carver Center in Beltsville, Maryland, that houses this agency first alerted staffers to the outbreak in mid-May before granting them some work-from-home days while the office was fumigated. The Trump administration has notoriously been on a crusade against telework—even for those with disabilities—since the President reassumed office, so this allowance for bed bug bombing was no small thing.
But that very same blind demand that work be done in-office, regardless of circumstance, may also be why federal employees returned too early to their workplace, which had not been adequately aired out. According to NOTUS’s reporting, when returning employees started complaining and getting sick from the lingering poison gas, the USDA granted them a few more days of telework.
After what appears to have been another extermination job rushed through just to get their employees back in the office, the APHIS finds itself with yet another outbreak as of last Friday. This time, however, the USDA refuses to approve further remote work. Instead, employees are invited to take personal vacation time if they’d like a work environment that won’t leave them looking like Pig Pen.
Adding insult to injury was a message to the staff from the department’s acting chief operating officer, Carson Hawley. In the Friday blast email, Hawley suggested that staffers only had themselves to blame for the continued outbreaks, citing “insufficient compliance regarding personal items” as the root of the resurgence.
But employees who spoke to NOTUS explained they were wary that bringing their potentially infested personal belongings into their home might result in an infestation there too, forcing them to trash all their own belongings and fumigate their own houses, this time at personal expense.
The affected workers have also reportedly discussed among themselves the potential merits of filing a formal complaint with OSHA. Understandably, they worry about the possibility of retaliation while this current administration is still in power.
