Courtesy of the renowned epidemiologist Dr. W. H. Frost and the Rockefeller Foundation, Burney was allowed to extend his studies for six months of field work at the Joint Health Department of Charlottesville, Virginia, immunizing preschool children against diphtheria.

Like many of his generation at PHS, Burney came up through the ranks of then-Surgeon General Thomas Parran, Jr.’s venereal disease control programs, receiving specialized training at the New York Marine Hospital (1934) and assisting in the management of rapid treatment centers around the country.

Burney helped establish the first PHS mobile venereal disease clinic, in Brunswick, Georgia (1937–39), bringing access to treatment for African Americans, whom Jim Crow segregation excluded from the predominantly white locations of other facilities.

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.

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.

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 United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Burney began reorienting PHS structure to reflect its new functions.