President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he is nominating Dr. Erica Schwartz, a former deputy surgeon general and retired Coast Guard rear admiral, to serve as the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, filling a vacancy that has lingered for months after internal turmoil over vaccine policy.
Trump made the announcement in a Truth Social post that also named three additional senior health officials to new roles, signaling a broader leadership reset at an agency that has drawn persistent conservative criticism since the pandemic era.
The nomination marks Trump's third attempt to install a permanent CDC director. The agency has operated without one since August 2025, when Trump ousted Susan Monarez after she refused to step down amid a clash with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policy, the Washington Examiner reported. Since then, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has served as acting CDC director, though his authority to hold that title expired in March under federal law, CNBC reported Thursday.
Schwartz served as deputy surgeon general during Trump's first term from January 2019 to April 2021, a period that included the initial federal response to COVID-19. Butterfly Network, a medical technology company, has stated that Schwartz oversaw the nation's "public health deployment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic" during that tenure.
She holds degrees in medicine, law, and public health, credentials Trump highlighted in his post. The Washington Times noted that Schwartz served 24 years in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps before retiring as a rear admiral.
Trump's post praised her record in characteristically direct terms:
"Erica graduated from Brown University for College and Medical School, and served a distinguished career as a Doctor of Medicine in the United States Military, the Greatest and Most Powerful Force in the World, and then served as my Deputy Surgeon General during my First Term. She is a STAR!"
The Washington Examiner described Schwartz as lacking ties to the broader Make America Healthy Again movement and noted she does not have a history of opposing vaccines, a detail that may ease her path through Senate confirmation. For an administration that has drawn fire from the public-health establishment over Kennedy's vaccine skepticism, the pick of a credentialed military physician with mainstream bona fides looks like a deliberate effort to stabilize the agency.
Trump did not stop at the director's chair. In the same post, he announced three additional appointments designed to reshape CDC operations from the top down.
Sean Slovenski was named CDC Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer. Dr. Jennifer Shuford, who holds both an MD and a Master of Public Health, was tapped as CDC Deputy Director and Chief Medical Officer. And Dr. Sara Brenner, also an MD/MPH, was appointed Senior Counselor for Public Health to HHS Secretary Kennedy.
Trump described the group collectively as "Highly Respected Doctors of Medicine" who possess, in his words, "the knowledge, experience, and TOP degrees to restore the GOLD STANDARD OF SCIENCE at the CDC." The administration has consistently framed the agency's pandemic-era conduct, particularly its embrace of mask and vaccine mandates, as a departure from rigorous science, and the new slate of appointments reflects that posture.
Kennedy himself endorsed the pick. Fox News reported that the HHS secretary posted on X: "Thank you, President Trump, for nominating Dr. Erica Schwartz to serve as CDC Director." Kennedy added that he looks forward to "working together to restore trust, accountability, and scientific integrity at the CDC."
The vacancy Schwartz would fill has a tangled backstory. Trump fired Monarez in August 2025 after she refused to resign. The dispute reportedly centered on vaccine policy disagreements between Monarez and Kennedy, a friction point that has defined much of the administration's public-health agenda.
Bhattacharya, best known as a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration that challenged pandemic lockdowns, stepped in as acting director while continuing to lead NIH. But that arrangement hit a legal wall: federal law limits how long an acting official can serve, and CNBC reported Thursday that Bhattacharya's acting authority expired in March. The nomination of Schwartz, if confirmed by the Senate, would resolve that ambiguity.
The confirmation process itself remains an open question. The nomination will require Senate approval, and while Just The News reported that Sen. Tommy Tuberville has expressed support, the broader Senate landscape is unclear. Trump's personnel picks have faced varied levels of resistance on Capitol Hill, as seen in the recent procedural battles over the DHS confirmation of Markwayne Mullin.
The CDC's reputation has not recovered from the pandemic. Conservatives have long argued that the agency allowed political considerations to shape its guidance on school closures, masking, and vaccine mandates, actions that imposed enormous costs on families and small businesses while doing little to slow the virus's spread. Trump's post echoed that view, calling the agency under the Biden administration "an absolute disaster focused on 'mandates.'"
Whether Schwartz can thread the needle, satisfying an administration that wants to overhaul the agency's culture while reassuring a public-health establishment that prizes institutional continuity, will depend on what she does once confirmed. Her military background and first-term experience suggest someone comfortable operating within large bureaucracies, not an outsider looking to burn one down.
The broader pattern is worth watching. Trump has moved aggressively to reshape the executive branch through personnel, from potential Supreme Court vacancies to agency leadership across the federal government. The CDC pick fits that mold: find someone with credentials the other side cannot easily dismiss, install them in a broken institution, and dare critics to object.
Meanwhile, the legal landscape around executive authority continues to shift. Federal judges have repeatedly clashed with the administration over policy implementation, and any major changes Schwartz pursues at the CDC could face their own courtroom challenges.
For now, the facts are straightforward. The CDC has gone more than eight months without a permanent director. The acting arrangement ran past its legal shelf life. And the agency's credibility with the American public, particularly the half that felt steamrolled by pandemic mandates, remains badly damaged.
Schwartz did not make a public statement at the time of the announcement. Her confirmation hearing, whenever it comes, will be the first real test of whether this pick can hold.
An agency that lost the public's trust by putting mandates ahead of science now gets a chance at a fresh start. The question is whether Washington will let it happen, or whether the confirmation process will turn into yet another proxy war over the pandemic decisions Americans are still paying for.
