So usafacts.org was checking the user-agent headers to decide whether to send the latest data or not. I changed to a valid, but old, Mozilla user-agent string and now get the latest updates with wget. Amazing the fuckery that goes on behind the scenes. All this time my scripts were failing because of this shit.
last updated 2020-10-01 23:26:57. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com