Trump taps Dr. Erica Schwartz to lead CDC amid agency concerns

President Donald Trump has nominated Dr. Erica Schwartz to serve as the next director of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.

Schwartz served as the deputy surgeon general during Trump’s first administration and retired as a Rear Admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. She is a preventative medicine physician and also served as the chief medical officer of the U.S. Coast Guard.

“When I was a military physician, my job was all about readiness. It was all about public health: prevention, vaccines, early detection. If we get that right, we change lives before illness ever begins,” Schwartz said in a video on Instagram.

If confirmed, Schwartz will answer directly to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Admiral Paul Zukunft, the former commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, chose Schwartz as their chief medical officer in 2015. He told NPR that Schwartz was a brilliant doctor and lawyer.

“She was not in the least bit reticent when it came to talking truth to power,” he said.

Health professionals and former CDC employees told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that they were encouraged by the nomination, but they remain wary about whether Schwartz will be able to stabilize the agency.

“You’re putting a director in place into an organization that is so deeply dismantled that it’s going to take much longer than a year or six months to get it up and functioning the way that it was just a year and a half ago,” said Abby Tighe, who is now the executive director of the National Public Health Coalition. She was one of the many people fired from the CDC in February of last year.