Protecting Americans from biological threats

Sgt. Thomas Hyland, extraction team member with the New Hampshire Army National Guard, is scanned for biohazards in the decontamination process during a training exercise on March 26, 2024. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Kelly Boyer, 114th Public Affairs Detachment)

By Paul Friedrichs, J. Stephen Morrison, Michaela Simoneau and Sophia Hirshfield • Feb 09, 2026

Congress and the executive branch have a responsibility to defend the United States against a growing range of biological risks from natural, accidental, and deliberate origins. These threats can affect humans as well as U.S. agricultural industries.

In the fall of 2025, the CSIS Bipartisan Alliance for Global Health Security (CSIS Bipartisan Alliance) launched a working group to develop a prioritized list of critical, near-term policy solutions to address gaps in U.S. biodefense capabilities. The working group identified strategic risks that could be quickly mitigated, examined numerous preexisting biodefense reviews, and generated a prioritized set of practical recommendations for the U.S. government to modernize biosurveillance, ensure biosafety and biosecurity, reverse the decline of the biodefense enterprise, and strengthen response and recovery.

Together, these commonsense, immediate actions provide a vision for a feasible and affordable bipartisan path forward to improve U.S. biopreparedness.