Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order taking aim at mosquitoes and ticks in the D.C. area. The order calls on several government departments to collaborate on plans to reduce the population of both pests by 2028.
Trump’s order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and other federal officials to “develop and implement a campaign” within 60 days that would cut certain invasive mosquito species by 90 percent and the tick population by 50 percent in two years.
The federal government will aim to use “commonsense, non-chemical, technology-enabled measures” instead of conventional pesticides, the order says.
The goal is not to spray chemicals but to use more modern techniques such as the one I wrote about here. Google has been seeking permits to release millions of harmless male mosquitoes (the males don't bite) that will then mate with the females and produce eggs that never hatch.
Google has requested permission to release up to 64 million infected mosquitoes across California and Florida in a “debugging” programme designed to slow the spread of disease.
Flooding the states with tens of millions of mosquitoes may sound like a surprising way to reduce the number of the blood-sucking insects, but the bugs in question would all be sterilised males.
Male mosquitoes do not bite and thus do not carry the risk of spreading disease posed by females. Instead the plan is for them to mate with females, who would then lay eggs that will never hatch, thereby reducing the number of mosquitoes generation by generation.
The males don't even need to be genetically modified to make this work. All Google has to do is expose the males to a common bacteria called Wolbachia which is harmless to people and animals but makes the male mosquitoes sterile. In fact, Google has been seeking permission to use this technique in D.C.
The order — another instance of the president’s close oversight of day-to-day life in the city he now calls home — comes as EPA faces a pile of permit requests from biotech companies for various types of “mosquito birth control.”
Perhaps the largest applications awaiting EPA approval comes from tech giant Google’s “Debug Project,” which aims to sterilize male mosquitoes with a bacteria called Wolbachia. Google’s experimental use permit to test the bacteria on the Asian tiger, or aedes albopictus, mosquito, the species that dominates Washington, is still pending after the public comment period closed in May.
Google is also testing the bacteria on the Egyptian, or aedes aegypti, mosquitoes, the strain most notorious as the primary transmitter of Zika, chikungunya, dengue and other deadly viruses.
This strategy has already been tried in a small part of D.C. and Maryland this summer.
A Silver Spring, Maryland, company released about 600,000 male mosquitoes across 25 properties in DC and Maryland this summer.
The mosquitoes are infected with naturally occurring Wolbachia bacteria. The males don't bite people, and when they mate with females that don't carry the same bacteria, the resulting eggs don't hatch.
That can help reduce the mosquito population over time, but the local program is separate from the federal government's new effort.
None of this is really new or untested at this point. The same technique has been used around the world. An experiment performed in California resulted in a massive drop in the population of biting female mosquitoes.
Google's Debug worked with the Kentucky-based company MosquitoMate on project in which they released Wolbachia-infected male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes for three years in partnership with the Fresno County Mosquito Control District in California. This invasive (and now pervasive in the U.S.) species of mosquito is the vector for numerous maladies including dengue, chikungunya, Zika, and yellow fever. The result was that at peak mosquito season, the number of biting female Aedes aegypti in treated Fresno neighborhoods dropped by more than 95 percent.
The only reason this isn't more widespread at this point is that producing millions of healthy but sterile male mosquitoes without releasing females as well has been somewhat labor intensive. Google claims to have solved those problems using AI. This press release is from May of this year.
For over a decade, Debug has developed end-to-end technologies to help protect the 4 billion people worldwide at risk of dengue by integrating custom software, hardware automation, scientific innovation, and AI in its mosquito suppression programme...
To scale its impact, Debug is growing its team of software and hardware engineers alongside mosquito scientists in Singapore to accelerate the deployment of next-generation AI and robotics. These advancements will enhance the scaled production of Wolbachia-carrying male mosquitoes, and additional innovations to offer more effective ways to manage mosquito-borne diseases in Singapore, Southeast Asia, and beyond.
This expansion builds on its years of production and releases in communities across countries like Singapore, Italy, Australia, and the US, and comes as the initiative crosses a milestone of releasing more than 1 billion male mosquitoes globally since inception.
As it happens, signs went up in my southern California neighborhood last week warning that the number of mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus was unusually high this year. The number of mosquitoes in general is said to be up to 900 percent higher than previous years because of perfect breeding conditions this year.
"This is a five-alarm year for mosquitoes," said Brian Bannon, a spokesperson for the Orange County Mosquito and Vector Control District. "It's just off the charts."
The latest data from Orange County vector control shows that 718 mosquito nets have tested positive for West Nile virus, a drastic jump from the 70 recorded at the same time last year. So far in 2026, at least 18 people in Orange County have tested positive for the virus, another steep increase from the zero patients recorded in the first nine months of 2025.
Bannon said that the mosquito population this year is unprecedented and that they're working with the Orange County Health Care Agency to spray and get rid of the nuisance.
All that to say, I'd love to see a big reduction in the mosquito population here. It would be great if this could become standard operating procedure in summers like this one when the population is expected to be unusually high.
Editor's Note: Do you enjoy HotAir's conservative reporting that takes on the radical Left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member