Senate confirms Erica Schwartz as CDC Director
Dr Erica Schwartz speaking at her nomination hearing in front of the Senate HELP Committee on 15th July.
The CDC has permanent leadership in place for the first time since August 2025, after the US Senate confirmed the appointment of Dr Erica Schwartz as director of the public health agency.
The CDC's last permanent director was Dr Susan Monarez, who was ousted last summer for not supporting what she claimed were unscientific directives at HHS under Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr – and the agencies it operates – after just 29 days in the role.
Schwartz takes over at the CDC from Jay Bhattacharya, who has been overseeing the agency while also serving as director of the NIH, who in turn replaced Jim O'Neill, who was acting CDC director whilst also HHS Deputy Secretary but stepped down from both roles in February.
She is the first Black woman to lead the CDC, and was nominated by President Donald Trump's, having served as deputy surgeon general during his first term in office, and is a trained physician, with prior experience as chief medical officer of the US Coast Guard. She also worked for 24 years in the Commissioned Corps of the US Public Health Service and has no obvious links to the anti-vaccine lobby, which has come into the ascendancy in HHS agencies under Kennedy.
Senators backed Schwartz's appointment by a vote of 51 to 44, split mainly along party lines, and she is expected to be sworn in within a few days after some final administrative processing.
There's no question that the standing of the CDC has been damaged by a major overhaul of federal vaccine policies, concerns that politics rather than science has started to guide decisions, the dismissal by Kennedy of experienced senior leaders, and his firing of external expert advisors in order to replace them with his own hand-picked selections.
Schwartz faces the challenge of restoring faith in the fractured agency, tackling a vacuum in senior leadership after mass layoffs – with a recent report suggesting 80% of director-level positions remain vacant – and living up to her repeated confirmation hearing pledges to maintain scientific integrity and radical transparency against pushback from politically motivated interests.
She was criticised in some quarters – including the National Public Health Coalition, a group of former CDC employees critical of Kennedy – for sidestepping questioning at her confirmation hearing about some of Kennedy's controversial policy changes.
"Dr Schwartz offered broad assurances about science, transparency, and trust. But broad assurances are not enough," said the NPHC after the hearing.
"The public needed to hear clear commitments about how she would protect CDC guidance from political pressure. Too often, her stated commitments were incomplete, vague, or missing."
Aside from dealing with political pressures and the structural issues afflicting the CDC, Schwartz's immediate tasks will include countering the surging cases of measles in the US – now at a 35-year high – and dealing with the ongoing outbreak of food-borne protozoal infection cyclosporiasis, as well as emerging international threats like Ebola.
