The Kay Hagan Tick Act

This is the law behind most of the federal tick research that exists, named after a senator who died from a disease most folks have never even heard of.

US Senator Kay Hagan out of North Carolina died in 2019 from Powassan virus, which I cover on the diseases page. Congress named this law after her. It set up the first real coordinated national plan for tick and mosquito-borne diseases, created research centers around the country, set up training programs, and put together agreements between the CDC and state health departments to actually get this stuff tracked properly.

The Reauthorization

The original law ran from 2019 through 2025. There's a bill now, the Kay Hagan Tick Reauthorization Act, that would stretch it out through 2030 and put $27 million more toward CDC research. It cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee with a unanimous vote in May 2026, which doesn't happen with much in Congress these days. Kennedy threw his support behind it at the same press event covered on the HHS announcement page.

Why this actually matters: the research centers this law funds are doing the real legwork on tracking ticks. TickEncounter out of URI, probably the best free tick ID resource out there, runs inside this same network. If the funding dries up, we lose a lot of the monitoring that tells us where ticks are headed next and what they're carrying with them.