were disposed of and the stockpile program closed in 1974. Clinton Administration In April 1998, President Bill Clinton read the Richard Preston novel The Cobra Event, a fiction book about a mad scientist spreading a virus throughout New York City. As a result, Clinton held a meeting with scientists and cabinet officials to discuss the threat of bioterrorism. He was so impressed that he asked the experts to meet with senior-level aides at the Department of Defense and in the Department of Health and Human Services. At that time, the government had stockpiles of medications for military personnel, but did not have them for civilians. Shortly after, The Washington Post wrote that Clinton surprised many in Washington at how fast he and his National Security Council had moved to change that. By October, Clinton signed into law a new budget of $51 million for pharmaceutical and vaccine stockpiling to be carried out by the CDC. The US Congress appropriated funds for the CDC to create a pharmaceutical and vaccine stockpile to handle biological and chemical threats from disease that could affect large numbers of the US civilian population, in Public Law 105–277 dated October 21, 1998. The original name was the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile (NPS) program, but additional materials have been added to the stockpile since the original authorization . Bush Administration The federal government implemented a pandemic blueprint for distribution of Personal Protective Equipment (P.P.E.) from the Strategic National Stockpile, in coordination with public and private efforts. On March 1, 2003, the NPS was renamed the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) program with joint management by Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services. In 2005 and in preparation for a predictable pandemic influenza, the Bush administration called for the coordination of domestic production and stockpiling of protective personal equipment. In 2006, the US Congress funded the integration of protective equipment to a Strategic National Stockpile: 52 million surgical masks and 104 million N95 air-filtration masks were acquired and added. Public Health Emergency lists large-scale deployments from the SNS in response to emergencies. The SNS successfully deployed 12-hour "push packages" to New York City and Washington, D.C., in response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and managed inventory (MI) to numerous locations in response to the anthrax terrorist attacks of 2001. Following the landfall of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the Gulf coast of Mississippi