Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

The Communicable Disease Center was founded July 1, 1946, as the successor to the World War II Malaria Control in War Areas program of the Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities.

Preceding its founding, organizations with global influence in malaria control were the Malaria Commission of the League of Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation greatly supported malaria control, sought to have the governments take over some of its efforts, and collaborated with the agency.

The new agency was a branch of the U.S. Public Health Service and Atlanta was chosen as the location because malaria was endemic in the Southern United States. The agency changed names before adopting the name Communicable Disease Center in 1946. Offices were located on the sixth floor of the Volunteer Building on Peachtree Street.

With a budget at the time of about $1 million, 59 percent of its personnel were engaged in mosquito abatement and habitat control with the objective of control and eradication of malaria in the United States.

Among its 369 employees, the main jobs at CDC were originally entomology and engineering. In CDC's initial years, more than six and a half million homes were sprayed, mostly with DDT. In 1946, there were only seven medical officers on duty and an early organization chart was drawn. Under Joseph Walter Mountin, the CDC continued to be an advocate for public health issues and pushed to extend its responsibilities to many other communicable diseases.

In 1947, the CDC made a token payment of $10 to Emory University for 15 acres (61,000 m) of land on Clifton Road in DeKalb County, still the home of CDC headquarters as of 2025. CDC employees collected the money to make the purchase. The benefactor behind the "gift" was Robert W. Woodruff, chairman of the board of the Coca-Cola Company. Woodruff had a long-time interest in malaria control, which had been a problem in areas where he went hunting. The same year, the PHS transferred its San Francisco based plague laboratory into the CDC as the Epidemiology Division, and a new Veterinary Diseases Division was established.

The CDC inherited the Tuskegee syphilis experiment from its predecessor, the U.S. Public Health Service. In the study, which lasted from 1932 to 1972, a group of Black men (nearly 400 of whom had syphilis) were studied to learn more about the disease. …

The CDC is organized into centers, institutes, and offices (CIOs), with each organizational unit implementing the agency's activities in a particular area of expertise while also providing intra-agency support and resource-sharing for cross-cutting issues and specific health threats.

As of the most recent reorganization in February 2023, the CIOs are:

The Office of Public Health Preparedness was created during the 2001 anthrax attacks shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Its purpose was to coordinate among the government the response to a range of biological terrorism threats.

Most CDC centers are located in the Atlanta metropolitan area, where it has three major campuses:

A few of the centers are based in or operate other domestic locations:

As of 2021, CDC staff numbered approximately 15,000 personnel (including 6,000 contractors and 840 United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps officers) in 170 occupations. Eighty percent held bachelor's degrees or higher; almost half had advanced degrees (a master's degree or a doctorate such as a PhD, D.O., or M.D.).

Common CDC job titles include engineer, entomologist, epidemiologist, biologist, physician, veterinarian, behavioral scientist, nurse, medical technologist, economist, public health advisor, health communicator, toxicologist, chemist, computer scientist, and statistician. The CDC also operates a number of notable training and fellowship programs, including those indicated below.

The Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) is composed of "boots-on-the-ground disease detectives" who investigate public health problems domestically and globally. When called upon by a governmental body, EIS officers may embark on short-term epidemiological assistance assignments, or "Epi-Aids", to provide technical expertise in containing and investigating disease outbreaks. The EIS program is a model for the international Field Epidemiology Training Program.

The CDC also operates the Public Health Associate Program (PHAP), a two-year paid fellowship for recent college graduates to work in public health agencies all over the United States. PHAP was founded in 2007 and currently has 159 associates in 34 states.

The director of the CDC is a position that currently requires Senate confirmation. The director serves at the pleasure of the president and may be fired at any time. The CDC director concurrently serves as the Administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Prior to January 20, 2025, it was a Senior Executive Service position that could be filled either by a career employee, or as a political appointment that does not require Senate confirmation, with the latter method typically being used. The change to requiring Senate confirmation was due to a provision in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023.

The CDC and its predecessor agencies have had more than twenty directors, including three during the Trump administration (including Anne Schuchat who twice served as acting director) and three during the Carter administration (including one acting director not shown here). Two served under Bill Clinton, but only one under the Nixon to Ford terms.

The following persons have served as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (or chief of the Communicable Disease Center):

In 2025, nearly half of the CDC databases faced unexplained pauses, mostly concerning vaccination surveillance. In October 2025, 38 publicly available CDC databases, which should be updated monthly, were not current, and by December 2025 only one of those databases had been updated. In addition to databases concerning vaccines, databases reporting on respiratory diseases and drug overdose deaths have also not been updated. The pauses to these databases being updated began mostly around when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as HHS secretary.

In February 2026, Scientific American wrote that trust in the CDC has "plummeted under [Kennedy's] watch". As the CDC's databases are no longer maintained with accurate and up-to-date information, a "shadow CDC" of states and medical societies is forming to fill the vacuum:

The agency has been a leading voice for evidence-backed health guidance and a sentinel for deadly disease outbreaks for decades. But over the past year, the CDC's authority has crumbled as the agency has replaced subject matter experts with vaccine deniers and discarded evidence in favor of ideology.