Dr. Erica Schwartz appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Wednesday for a confirmation hearing to become director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where senators pressed her on vaccines and whether she would stand up to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; she struggled to convince them, Sen. Cassidy asked, "Why would you repeat those damn lies?" and Schwartz said she would not "betray the science."
Schwartz is a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps with degrees in medicine, law and public health; she previously served as chief medical officer of the U.S. Coast Guard and as deputy surgeon general in the first Trump administration, and she earned a medical degree from Brown University and served in the U.S. Navy until 2005.
She was nominated by President Donald Trump in April.
The agency has endured frequent leadership turnover: Schwartz is the third nominee to lead the CDC in the president's second term and is the fourth person named or nominated as head of the agency since last summer, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, took over as acting CDC director in February.
A trove of internal CDC emails released by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont covered exchanges from January through August 2025 that showed staff cuts, confusion over leadership and efforts to insert political review into CDC policymaking, including an Aug. 19, 2025, message from Matt Buckham that said, "I wanted to elevate the absolute need for political review of major policy decisions at CDC," added "Please err on the side of caution," and signed off "Make America Great!"
Sean Slovenski, the CDC's deputy director and chief operating officer, said in a recorded all-hands meeting that he had "heard a lot … from people about what the morale is like here, how we've gotten to a point where it's not as happy as it used to be, the stress level's extremely high," and pledged to proceed with a reorganization "in the most thoughtful manner," adding, "I'm not promising that everyone will be happy. What I'm promising is that everyone will be clear."
The Wednesday session also included the confirmation hearing of Sean Kaufman, nominated to serve as assistant secretary for strategic preparedness and response at HHS; Kaufman is a senior adviser for global affairs at the CDC who has responded to outbreaks and who has questioned the safety and need for universal COVID-19 and hepatitis B vaccines, and he has said the COVID-19 vaccine caused "excessive death and injury ... in the United States and globally." Kaufman has since walked back comments skeptical of vaccine safety.
Susan Monarez was confirmed as CDC director in July 2025 but held the post for less than a month before she was fired by Kennedy; that turmoil prompted both Kennedy and Monarez to appear before Senate committees, and at a Senate hearing Kennedy denied telling Monarez to accept vaccine recommendations without scientific evidence and said she was fired in part because she told him she was untrustworthy.