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.