Private Sector Funding

Soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus stopped in at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was disturbed by what he saw and heard. Marcus visited the CDC's makeshift Emergency Operations Center, a jumble of out-of-date equipment thrown together in an old auditorium. CDC experts had been on the scene in New York when the twin towers fell, Marcus learned, but they had been unable to communicate with Atlanta. Cell phones weren't working, and CDC staff had not been authorized to buy satellite phones. "CDC, from a physical standpoint, was not prepared," says Marcus, Home Depot's ex-chairman and CEO. "When I saw this, I kept asking the question: Why don't you have more up-to-date equipment?"

The answer came back that it wasn't in the budget. So Marcus took matters into his own hands. He wrote a $3.9 million check from his Marcus Foundation to buy state-of-the-art equipment for a CDC emergency response center. Since then more than a dozen business leaders have followed suit. Hewlett-Packard Co. has donated $35,000 worth of computer printers. Motorola Inc. has forked over $51,000 in radio equipment. Shure Inc. has given $22,000 worth of video teleconferencing equipment.

Facilitating these private sector gifts is an unusual Atlanta nonprofit whose sole mission is to support the CDC. Authorized by Congress in 1992, and opened three years later, the CDC foundation has raised about $60 million for training, prevention and educational programs. More than half of the money comes from tax-exempt foundations, with much of the rest coming from corporations. Some foreign governments have donated money to the foundation to underwrite CDC programs overseas. The foundation also receives a $500,000 administrative grant from the CDC itself every year. "Our mission and vision is to improve health around the world in one very specific way, and that is by substantially enhancing CDC's impact," says foundation President and Chief Executive Officer C. Charles Stokes. The foundation's latest project is to raise $2 million for an emergency response fund to back up the CDC in the event of another public health catastrophe.

The fund could help the CDC with short-term staff in an emergency, for example. During the anthrax crisis, CDC scientists worked around-the-clock and slept on cots in a makeshift rest area. Under the CDC's emergency hiring authority, it can take 60 to 90 days to bring a retired scientist back on board. But the foundation can hire lab workers immediately and assign them to the CDC.

The fund also stands ready to hand CDC field teams blank credit cards in an emergency, Stokes notes. (There is a $5,000 limit per card.) Stokes acknowledges that this kind of slush fund, as he candidly describes it, is "anathema" to the way government usually works. "You want accountability, you want trails, you want processes," says Stokes. "And that's all entirely appropriate for day-to-day operations. But when I'm the CDC person on the ground in New York, having to make a decision that could affect lives, I need flexibility. And I think what we can do as a not-for-profit is say: 'You know what? We trust your judgment in that case.'"