Erica Schwartz, a former deputy surgeon general and member of the U.S. military, will take over from what has amounted to a rapid succession of CDC leaders over the past year.
Jay Bhattacharya has one less hat to wear after President Donald Trump announced he is nominating Erica Schwartz as the next director of the CDC.
The president nominated Schwartz, a former deputy surgeon general in Trump’s first administration, to the Senate-confirmable position in a post on his social media network, Truth Social, on Thursday afternoon.
“She is a STAR,” Trump said after listing Schwartz’s professional and educational accolades.
Schwartz—who served 24 years in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and as a rear admiral in the Coast Guard, and also holds a medical degree from Brown University and a law degree from the University of Maryland—becomes the fourth person to lead the CDC in the past year.
Susan Monarez, the first CDC director to be confirmed by the Senate under a 2023 law, was fired less than a month after clashing with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr last year. In an opinion published in The Wall Street Journal in September, Monarez said she had been asked to “preapprove” recommendations from Kennedy’s newly instated vaccine advisors regarding COVID-19 immunization guidelines—which she refused to do.
The top CDC role was then filled in an acting capacity by Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill until February, when National Institutes of Health head Bhattacharya took over as acting director.
In the same social post, Trump appointed a cadre of nominees to the CDC leadership team. FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Sara Brenner will be a public health adviser to Kennedy, while Jennifer Shuford, current commissioner of the Texas health department, will serve as Schwartz’s deputy director and the agency’s chief medical officer.
Shuford will step into the CMO role once held by Debra Houry, who resigned after Monarez was forced out. Both Monarez and Houry testified in front of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in September 2025, during which Houry said that “Trust and transparency have been broken. The problem is not too much science but too little.”
Sean Slovenski, a former executive at Walmart and Humana, will become a deputy director and chief operating officer at the CDC. Slovenski holds a BA in Health and Physical Education, according to his LinkedIn profile.
“These Highly Respected Doctors of Medicine have the knowledge, experience, and TOP degrees to restore the GOLD STANDARD OF SCIENCE at the CDC, which was an absolute disaster focused on ‘mandates’ under Sleepy Joe,” Trump said in his post, referring to former President Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, Kennedy also alluded to the new team during a congressional budget hearing on Thursday.
“We’re bringing in an extraordinary team. … The team has been leaked, and it’s gotten applause from both Republicans and Democrats,” the secretary said while testifying in front of the House Appropriations subcommittee on health, CNN reported. “I think this new team is really going to be able to revolutionize CDC and get it back on track and get it doing the job that it does better than any other health agency in the world.”