Edgardo Rafael Baez

Congress should treat this as an eradication campaign, not a press conference. New World screwworm is not a food-safety scare. It does not infest packaged meat. It is a flesh-eating parasite of living warm-blooded animals. Leave it in the herd and you get dead calves, wrecked wildlife, higher beef prices on a herd already at multi-decade lows, and a bill measured in billions.

1. Finish the sterile-fly machine on a wartime clock. 2. Keep science-based quarantines—and make them livable for ranchers. 3. Reopen Mexican livestock ports only with a kill switch. 4. Watch wildlife and pets, not just the sale barn. 5. Pay for detection at the border the way we pay for any other invasion. 6. Hold the long-term lab and producer toolkit.

What I would not support: treating every detection as proof the whole state must shut down commerce; slashing quarantines because they are inconvenient; or assuming Mexico’s paper protocol is a substitute for traps and audits.

Eradicate it. Build the fly plants here. Inspect the border. Help the rancher who reports a wound instead of punishing him. That is agricultural biosecurity.

I support data-center growth that pays cash for the electrons and the water it uses—and I oppose growth that puts that bill on a CPS or SAWS customer in TX-20.

Texas can lead this market. It should not lead it by socializing infrastructure onto families who are already on Stage 3 watering restrictions and watching the ERCOT queue swell to several times the state’s record peak.

I would support, at the federal margin and as a Texas partner: Cost causation in rates. Bring-your-own generation or a binding power-purchase that adds capacity, not just demand. Filter the queue.

No “AI exceptionalism” on winter risk. Potable water is for people. Cooling is a process load. Repeal the blank-check sales-tax holiday for servers and construction. Keep competition for real jobs, not for 20 positions on a billion-dollar box.

Texas’s water problem is not a single shortage. It is a simultaneous flood-and-drought problem plus aging pipes, a growing population, declining groundwater in key aquifers, and widespread surface-water impairments. The 2027 State Water Plan (adopted July 2026) puts the price tag at roughly $174 billion (2023 dollars) through 2080 to produce about 7.6 million acre-feet per year of additional supply under drought-of-record conditions. Conservation and reuse together account for a large share of that volume because they are usually the cheapest and most drought-resilient options. Irrigation remains the largest single use of groundwater.

I would not treat this as a choice between “build more reservoirs” and “make farmers use less water.” The data favor a portfolio that starts with the lowest-cost, highest-certainty measures and then adds new supply only where the economics and hydrology justify it. Property rights, local knowledge, and measurable results should constrain the tools.

Texas’s grid problem is no longer only the 2021 Uri failure. It is now the combination of that winterization lesson, rapid evening net-load ramps as solar drops, localized transmission constraints (especially Far West Texas), and a large-load interconnection queue that is several times current peak demand—most of it data-center and computational load that may or may not actually get built.

Summer 2026 so far has been relatively stable, with batteries covering evening ramps and no conservation appeals issued through late August, but planning reserve margins in ERCOT’s Capacity, Demand and Reserve reports decline sharply later in the decade under high-load-growth cases. Far West Texas already faces pre-contingency load-shed risk under low-wind nighttime conditions.

I would support policies that treat reliability as an engineering and market-design problem rather than a technology or partisan contest. The goal is fewer outages for households and businesses at the lowest sustainable cost, while still allowing economic growth.

I would support keeping the negotiated rate system unless and until Congress replaces it through a transparent process with a model that still covers documented cost. The 2027-present rider exists because Congress already rejected a similar 10% proposal. Repealing it in order to impose a 15% flat rate would be a larger, abrupt transfer of cost onto institutions that planned multi-year labs, animal facilities, and compliance offices around the existing rules.

I would keep Texas’s existing school-entry requirements and the conscientious-exemption pathway. Removing non-medical exemptions after an outbreak in a specific community looks like punishment and is likely to increase underground noncompliance and homeschooling rather than raise durable coverage. HB 1586’s change to a downloadable (still notarized) affidavit lowered a procedural barrier; the subsequent rise in exemptions was predictable. Notarization remains a modest check that the choice is deliberate.

I would put more effort into the delinquency bucket than into new statewide mandates. Requiring schools to close documentation gaps, offering catch-up clinics at enrollment, and funding school nurses produces coverage gains among families who are not ideological objectors.

I would not support a statewide ban on conscientious exemptions, nor a policy that treats every cluster of low coverage as a problem to be solved only by tighter law. Herd-immunity math is real (measles R0 is high; 95% is the conventional target), but so is parental authority over a child’s medical interventions in a state that generally treats that authority as primary. The workable middle is: requirements remain, exemptions remain available with a small amount of process, outbreak tools stay sharp, and public health earns trust by being accurate when it is inconvenient.

At the federal level, I would support stable, high-quality surveillance and open publication of both effectiveness and adverse-event data, and I would oppose using a single year’s outbreak to rewrite the childhood schedule by executive order without the ordinary evidence process. I would also oppose gagging clinicians or parents who report rare harms.

The long-term stability of coverage depends less on the next statute than on whether families believe institutions will tell them the truth when the news is mixed. Two children died in Texas in 2025 from a disease their parents chose not to vaccinate against. That is a fact that should be stated plainly. So is the fact that many of their neighbors will not accept a policy that treats that choice as illegitimate. Policy that ignores either fact will fail.

Science is the best available method for testing claims about the physical world: does this vaccine reduce measles transmission and severe disease; how fast is this aquifer declining; what reserve margin keeps the lights on in August; what do audited F&A costs actually buy. When methods are transparent, results replicate, effect sizes are large, and incentives are not badly distorted, those findings should constrain policy. Ignoring them is not “values”; it is flying blind.

That is not the same as handing the decision to a panel. Experts estimate probabilities and mechanisms. Elected officials weigh those estimates against cost, rights, distributional effects, and what the public will accept and comply with. A republic that treats expert consensus as self-executing law has no place for disagreement about risk tolerance, parental authority, property, or fiscal limits.

Use science to map consequences and to kill policies that cannot survive contact with measurement. Use politics—accountable, constrained by rights and budgets—to choose among the remaining options. Publish the uncertainties. Separate empirical disagreement from moral disagreement. And when the two collide, do not resolve it by declaring one side illegitimate. Resolve it by making the tradeoffs explicit and letting voters fire the people who get them wrong.