CDC's $75 Million Global Health Security NOFO Closes June 25 — and the Eight Cooperative Agreements Will Define the Post-USAID Outbreak Architecture

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Notice of Funding Opportunity CDC-RFA-JG-26-0056, "Continuing to Enhance Global Health Security: Sustain Efforts and Strategies to Protect and Improve Public Health Globally," closes for applications on June 25, 2026. The NOFO carries a $75 million ceiling and an expected eight awards, structured as cooperative agreements rather than discretionary grants — meaning CDC technical staff will be active partners in award execution rather than passive funders. Posted to Grants.gov on August 22, 2025 with an estimated application posting date of April 24, 2026, the announcement has had a roughly two-month application window. That timing is tight by federal standards for a $75 million cooperative agreement, and the structural reason the window is tight is the same reason the solicitation is unusually consequential.

The NOFO is one of the largest remaining flexible federal funding mechanisms for global health security work that operates through bilateral partnerships with foreign Ministries of Health and government institutions. The dismantling of USAID over the course of 2025 eliminated the principal U.S. instrument for sustained bilateral global health cooperation, and the CDC's own reorganization — driven by the proposed restructuring absorbing several CDC chronic disease and global health centers into a new MAHA agency — has narrowed the set of CDC offices that can run sustained foreign-partnership programming. CDC-RFA-JG-26-0056 sits at the intersection of those two structural shifts: a funding line that the agency is willing to push through the new oversight regime, with terms designed to keep the U.S. outbreak-detection-and-response architecture functional through a transition that has already removed most of its peer instruments.

What the NOFO Actually Funds

The solicitation requires applicants to deliver against four functional capabilities of the World Health Organization's International Health Regulations framework — surveillance and laboratory systems, biorisk management, emergency preparedness and response, and workforce development — through partnerships with health ministries and governmental institutions in priority countries. Activities include strengthening national public health laboratory networks, supporting field epidemiology training programs, building diagnostic capacity for emerging and reemerging infectious diseases, supporting national biosafety and biosecurity programs, and improving the capacity of partner countries to comply with their IHR notification obligations.

The funding instrument matters for how the work gets done. A cooperative agreement under CDC management means a substantive technical role for CDC subject-matter experts — typically a designated CDC project officer, technical advisors embedded in award execution, and joint workplan development between the awardee and CDC's Global Health Center. Cooperative agreements are slower to negotiate than grants because the cooperative role has to be specified up front, but they produce more durable partnerships because the technical relationship outlasts any single fiscal-year appropriation. For partner Ministries of Health, the cooperative agreement structure is also more politically defensible — the work is technical assistance through a formal U.S. government partnership, not a discretionary grant that could be characterized as foreign aid.

Eligibility is unusually broad. The grants.gov listing shows unrestricted eligibility including state and local governments, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, tribal organizations, small businesses, and for-profit entities. There is no domestic-only restriction and no cost-share requirement. The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance number is 93.318, the "Protecting and Improving Health Globally" assistance listing. The estimated project period for awards under this assistance listing typically runs three to five years.

Why the Eligibility Design Quietly Favors a Specific Set of Applicants

Open eligibility on paper does not mean open competition in practice. The substantive requirements of a global-health-security cooperative agreement — operational presence in priority countries, established working relationships with foreign Ministries of Health, in-country logistics and procurement infrastructure, diplomatic clearance procedures and personnel security capabilities, and a track record of executing CDC technical workplans — narrow the realistic applicant pool to a relatively small set of institutions.

The principal candidates are the WHO Collaborating Centers and similar designated institutions at major U.S. universities (Johns Hopkins, Emory, the University of Washington, the University of California system, Columbia, Tulane, the University of Iowa), the major implementing partner nonprofits with sustained CDC partnership histories (CDC Foundation, Public Health Institute, Task Force for Global Health, RTI International, Abt Associates, ICAP at Columbia), and a small set of multilateral or quasi-governmental entities with U.S. legal status that can execute bilateral programs. The for-profit eligibility category is technically open, but for-profit primes are unusual in this specific funding line because the in-country relationships and the institutional review board structures favor academic and nonprofit applicants.

For applicants outside this incumbent set, the strategic question is whether subcontracting under a prime applicant is more realistic than primary application. The answer in most cases is yes — the NOFO is structured for institutions that can demonstrate immediate operational capacity in target countries on the award start date, and the eight expected awards do not leave room for the kind of project-staffing ramp that a new entrant typically needs. Subcontracting roles are real and substantial; the major implementing partners in this space typically pass through 30 to 60 percent of the cooperative agreement value to specialized subcontractors that provide laboratory equipment, surveillance software, epidemiological training, diagnostics, or country-specific cultural and language expertise.

The Geographic and Disease-Specific Priorities Are the Real Filter

CDC's Global Health Center maintains a defined set of priority countries for global health security investment, anchored on the Global Health Security Agenda framework that the United States co-founded in 2014. Priority countries shift modestly year over year based on outbreak threat assessments, but the core set has been stable: a tier of African countries with sustained CDC engagement (Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone), a tier of Southeast Asian countries with avian and emerging zoonotic disease history (Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia), and an expanding set of Latin American and Caribbean countries with arbovirus surveillance and antimicrobial resistance priorities. Applicants without operational presence or established Ministry of Health relationships in this priority set will not be competitive on the country-engagement criterion regardless of the strength of the technical proposal.

The disease-specific priorities reinforce the same constraint. The NOFO emphasizes emerging and reemerging infectious diseases — pathogens with epidemic and pandemic potential, antimicrobial-resistant organisms, vector-borne diseases sensitive to climate shifts, and zoonotic spillovers. The technical workplan structure requires applicants to demonstrate not just disease-specific expertise but also the laboratory diagnostic capability, the field epidemiology workforce, and the data-system integration to operate at national surveillance scale. This is not a research grant; it is an implementation cooperative agreement, and the review criteria reflect that.

Why June 25 Is a Real Deadline

Federal grant deadlines slip when an agency is short-staffed, when the political environment around a NOFO becomes contested, or when the technical guidance is still in flux. None of those conditions applies here. The CDC Global Health Center's posture toward CDC-RFA-JG-26-0056 has been consistently signaled since the August 2025 forecast — the agency wants the cooperative agreements in place before the new fiscal year so that the workplans can begin executing on the September 30 start date. The reorganization pressures inside HHS make it strategically important for the Global Health Center to lock in these multi-year obligations under current eligibility and oversight rules before any administrative restructuring takes effect.

The OMB rewrite of 2 CFR Part 200, which would take effect on October 1, 2026 and substantively change the federal grants framework, is the secondary reason the June 25 deadline is real. Any award CDC issues from this NOFO will be governed by the existing uniform guidance — but awards issued after October 1 would be subject to the new political-appointee pre-issuance review, the expanded termination authority, the E-Verify requirement, and the new policy-alignment language on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programming. The Global Health Center has a strong incentive to complete award negotiations before the new rule takes effect, which means the June 25 receipt date is unlikely to slip and the post-receipt negotiation timeline is likely to be compressed rather than extended.

What to Do If You Are Still Deciding

Three concrete moves follow from the structure of the solicitation. First, an applicant that is not part of the standard CDC global health implementing-partner ecosystem should not be submitting as a prime — the operational capacity required by the cooperative-agreement structure is too thin for a new entrant to bridge in a single application cycle. The realistic move is to identify which of the likely prime applicants has the strongest match for the specific technical contribution you can make (laboratory diagnostics, surveillance software, epidemiology training, biosecurity capacity, antimicrobial resistance work) and to position as a subcontractor.

Second, an applicant in the implementing-partner ecosystem that has been considering whether to apply should be writing toward the cooperative agreement's substantive role — the workplan structure that allows CDC technical staff to engage as partners — rather than treating the application as a standard grant proposal. Reviewers and CDC project officers are looking for evidence that the applicant can absorb CDC technical guidance, integrate it into country-level workplans, and report against the IHR functional capabilities in a way that supports both CDC's reporting obligations and the partner country's national health security framework.

Third, regardless of application posture for the current NOFO, every U.S. institution working in global health security should be building a contingency plan for the post-October 1 regulatory environment. The new 2 CFR 200 will affect every award issued after that date; the new political-appointee review will affect speed and predictability of award negotiation; the new termination-for-priority-alignment language will affect risk tolerance on multi-year cooperative agreements. The CDC Global Health Center's commitment to this funding line is durable, but the framework under which awards are negotiated will not be the framework that has governed the last decade of global-health-security cooperation.

Tools like Granted can map an institution's prior global-health cooperative-agreement history, surface the implementing-partner ecosystem that competes credibly for this specific NOFO, and flag the subcontracting opportunities that develop after the eight prime awards are negotiated. For the small set of institutions deciding whether to apply by June 25, the question is not whether the cooperative-agreement structure is workable — it is whether the post-October regulatory environment will reward applicants who lock in awards now versus those who wait for the next solicitation under whatever framework follows.