Trump to tap Monarez to lead CDC

Sandhya Raman, CQ-Roll Call on Mar 24, 2025

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Monday he has picked Susan Monarez, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to lead the agency after the White House unexpectedly withdrew the nomination of former Republican Rep. Dave Weldon earlier this month.

Trump made the announcement in a post on Truth Social, saying that “Americans have lost confidence in the CDC due to political bias and disastrous mismanagement.”

Monarez will work closely with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., he said, to prioritize accountability, high standards and disease prevention as part of the Make America Healthy Again platform.

Monarez was named the CDC’s acting director and acting administrator for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in January after previously serving as the deputy director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health since 2023.

An infectious disease researcher, she has a long, more traditional background in federal policy, which could assuage some concerns as the first CDC director that will require Senate confirmation. In 2023, Congress passed a law to ensure that an incoming CDC director is confirmed by the Senate, making Trump’s pick the first one to go through the process.

Trump selected Weldon, an internal medical physician, for the position in November, but rescinded the nomination on March 13, hours before the former Florida lawmaker was set to appear before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions panel for his confirmation hearing.

Some moderate Republicans had expressed concerns about Weldon’s views on vaccines, though the White House did not provide an official explanation for why the nomination was pulled.

Monarez has held leadership roles in multiple government agencies beyond ARPA-H, serving also as assistant director for National Health Security and International Affairs in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the director of medical preparedness policy for the National Security Council.

Prior to that she also worked as the chief of the threat characterization and attribution branch at the Department of Homeland Security and as a biodefense policy adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Her work across roles has included efforts to incorporate artificial intelligence ethically to improve various health outcomes, navigate national security and biomedical threats, combat antimicrobial resistance and reducing disparities in health care.

As head of CDC, she’d oversee a roughly $9.2 billion agency considered the nation’s top public health agency.

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