prepared for leadership by then-Surgeon General Leonard A. Scheele. Surgeon General When Surgeon General Scheele stepped down in August 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower nominated Burney on a recess appointment, and was sworn in as Surgeon General on August 8, 1956, and later confirmed by the Senate in January 1957. Surgeon General Burney applied his administrative know-how to steer PHS successfully through institutional growing pains as the agency responded to new and, at times, conflicting demands from the public, professional and voluntary advocacy groups, the parent Department, and the Congress. The key issues of the day were environmental health and access to health services, the former driven by widely shared alarm over deteriorating environmental conditions and fallout from the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and the latter by expectations that national health insurance would soon be realized. In many ways the Kerr-Mills Act of 1960, which authorized government financing of services for senior citizens without adequate means to pay for care, prefigured the Medicare and Medicaid programs that would transform national policy during the following decades. In response, Burney mustered his leadership to gather facts, draft plans for modernizing PHS and take action. Under future Surgeon General William H. Stewart, the Office of the Surgeon General's Division of Public Health Methods staffed a number of investigatory and advisory bodies whose reports still inform policy decisionmaking, including the Secretary's Consultants on Medical Research and Education (Bayne-Jones report, 1958); the Surgeon General's Consultant Group on Medical Education (Bane report, 1959); the Surgeon General's Report on Environmental Health Problems submitted to the House Appropriations Subcommittee (1959); and the Study Group on the Mission and Organization of the Public Health Service (Hundley report, 1960). In addition, during July 1957 Public Health Methods began implementing the National Health Survey Act of 1956, conducting the first periodic national surveys of chronic disease morbidity and health services: the triennial Health Interview Survey, and the mobile Health Examination Survey (which in 1971 became the Health and Nutrition Examination Survey). The Hundley Committee report urged that PHS shed the institutional remnants of its early missions (the hospitals and quarantine) and reorganize to better fulfill its post-1940 mandate to promote civilian public health. Unable to obtain formal authority from Congress but with permission from the Secretary of DHEW, Burney began reorienting PHS structure to reflect its new functions. The Bureau of State Services was divided into two parts, one devoted