Senate Holds Confirmation Hearing for CDC Director
On Wednesday, June 25, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) held a nomination hearing to consider Dr. Susan Monarez as Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). This comes after the previous nominee was pulled just hours by the Administration before their first hearing (previous COSSA coverage). Prior to her nomination, Dr. Monarez served as the acting Director of the CDC from January to March 2025 and the Deputy Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). During the hearing, Dr. Monarez faced extensive questioning about her priorities and goals for the agency if she were confirmed as director. She also fielded several inquiries about the CDC’s role in developing immunization guidelines, and her willingness to disagree with Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Throughout her testimony, Dr. Monarez deflected several questions about recent Executive Actions made by the Trump Administration and HHS Secretary Kennedy, including concerns raised by Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Andy Kim (D-NJ) about future staffing and funding for specific offices as well as the funding and program cuts made to the agency while she was acting Director. Further, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) questioned her on whether she disagreed with any of Secretary Kennedy’s health policies, to which she refused to give a clear answer. Dr. Monarez was also questioned by committee members on both sides of the aisle on Secretary Kennedy’s decision to fire all seventeen members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replace them with seven new members, raising concerns within the community; she stopped short of explicitly condemning or condoning his actions (previous COSSA coverage). In response to a line of questioning from Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Dr. Monarez explicitly said she would follow the law over the president’s directive, but only after stating that the president “would never ask [her] to break the law,” an assertion that drew skepticism from various Democratic committee members.
In addition to outlining her priorities of preventing the spread of communicable disease and supporting Secretary Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative, Dr. Monarez also highlighted the importance of data and indicated her intent to “strengthen data collection, analysis, and contribution to public health” in the agency’s future actions.
A recording of the hearing can be found here.
Monarez will require a full Senate vote prior to being confirmed as CDC Director. Stay tuned for continued COSSA coverage of the confirmation process.
This article was contributed by COSSA Intern Eva Lettiere.