Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Notable

Ban CDC Foundation acceptance of pharmaceutical industry money

Not started

454 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“From 2014 through 2018, the CDC Foundation received $79.6 million from pharmaceutical corporations like Pfizer, Biogen, and Merck. This practice presents a stark conflict of interest that should be banned.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The CDC Foundation still exists and still takes corporate money. It is a congressionally chartered non-profit under 42 U.S.C. 280e-11 and would need an Act of Congress or a charter change to be barred from accepting pharmaceutical contributions. No bill in the 119th Congress mentions the CDC Foundation, the Federal Register carries no document naming it in the window, and no presidential action addresses it. A third bound was added on 2026-09-03: CDC's complete newsroom for the window was enumerated through the agency's own search index (1,993 records, 176 dated on or after 2025-01-20) and no in-window release mentions the CDC Foundation — a query for "Foundation" against the in-window newsroom returns zero. That is a bounded negative about **CDC's own announcements**; it says nothing about what the Foundation itself did, because the Foundation publishes on `cdcfoundation.org`, which is off the allowlist.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Full-text Federal Register search for “CDC Foundation” since 2025-01-20 returns 0 documents; the same phrase appears in no title or abstract among the federal records we keep and search, and no 119th-Congress bill title among those we keep names it.
  • The Foundation’s own site (www.cdcfoundation.org) is off the allowlist and would in any case not be evidence of a federal action.
  • One search, run 2026-08-28, covered the p. 454 asks on CDC data, guidance and vaccine safety: this one, #1211, #1213, #1214 and #1215.
Action
eliminate
Object
pharmaceutical contributions through the CDC Foundation
ID
1212