Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the federal public health agency responsible for disease surveillance, prevention guidance and health-emergency response, within the Department of Health and Human Services. Entries naming it from 2025 onward record changes to published health guidance, conditions attached to its grant programmes, and reductions in its laboratory and programme capacity.
Also known as U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention · CDC
2026 Events (4)
CDC ordered health grantees to adopt 'parental authority' priorities and abandon harm reduction, threatening funding loss
The CDC issued a memo on June 25, 2026, to state, territorial, tribal, and local health program grantees requiring compliance with new agency priorities within five business days — by July 1 — or risk funding cancellation. The new priorities, obtained by The Guardian, included "parental authority" over children's education and required programs to move away from evidence-based harm reduction; programs covering immunizations, HIV, hepatitis, tobacco, and overdose prevention were affected. HHS confirmed the action after the story was published, and CDC program staff were reported to be unaware the memo had been sent.
Trump signed order directing CDC to align child vaccine schedule with Kennedy-backed study
On May 29, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to align federal childhood vaccine recommendations with a January 2026 HHS scientific assessment favored by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The assessment recommends narrowing routine childhood vaccination to 11 diseases, moving several others to case-by-case "shared decision-making" between doctors and parents.
CDC paused more than two dozen lab tests after downsizing gutted its reference labs
In the week of April 1, 2026, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted a list of more than two dozen diagnostic tests it had paused — the largest set the agency has ever halted at once — including testing for rabies, mpox, Epstein-Barr, and varicella-zoster, as well as rare imported pathogens. Reporting tied the pause directly to the agency's downsizing: staffing fell an estimated 20-25%, with the poxvirus and rabies labs losing about half their staff and the malaria branch gutted further. HHS called the pause a "routine review," a framing the reporting on staffing losses contradicts.
Trump administration moved to rescind $600M in CDC health grants, targeting only 4 of 107 recipient states
The Office of Management and Budget ordered the CDC to cancel roughly $602 million in public health grants -- funding disease-outbreak tracking, workforce and infrastructure programs -- to California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota, effective February 11, 2026; the same directive also canceled $943 million in Department of Transportation funding to the same four states. All four states, led by Democratic governors, sued the next day, and a federal judge in Illinois granted a 14-day temporary restraining order on February 12 keeping the health funds flowing while the case proceeds.
2025 Events (1)
CDC narrowed mandatory FoodNet pathogen surveillance from eight diseases to two as it dissolved its parasitic-disease division
Effective July 1, 2025, CDC narrowed mandatory reporting under FoodNet -- its foodborne-disease surveillance collaboration with ten state health departments covering roughly 54 million people -- from eight tracked pathogens to two, making reporting on Campylobacter, Cyclospora, Listeria, Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia optional. The same year, CDC dissolved its Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria, the office housing the agency's Cyclospora and parasitic-disease expertise, reassigning remaining staff elsewhere. Public health researchers publicly disputed CDC's stated funding rationale and warned the changes would leave outbreaks harder to detect.