Susan Monarerez, president of President Donald Trump to be director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), arrives to testify for his confirmation audience before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in the Dirksen Senate Board of the Senate Board on June 25, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Kayla Bartkowski | Getty images
On Wednesday, the White House said that President Donald Trump had dismissed the director of the Susan Monarez disease control and prevention centers after refusing to resign and will soon appoint a new replacement.
“The president dismissed her, which he has the right to do,” said the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt during a briefing.
She said that Trump has “the authority to dismiss those who are not aligned with his mission” and that he or the secretary of health and social services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will announce a new director “very soon”.
In a statement, Monarez lawyers said: “We don’t know anything new.”
“Receiving an e-mail from a member of HR staff simply saying” You are dismissed “is insufficient in law to constitute the termination of a federal employee, in particular that appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate,” said the lawyer of Monarez, Mark Zaid.
He is the last in an upheaval of leadership at the CDC.
Earlier Thursday, Zaid said that she was staying in the role because she is appointed presidential and that only Trump could dismiss her. Zaid said that the White House staff dismissed her, not the president.
He also said that she “refused to stadium non -scientific rubber, reckless guidelines and health experts dedicated to fire” and that she “chose to protect the public to serve a political agenda”.
“For that, it was targeted,” he said.
Monarez and Kennedy disagreed on the vaccine policy, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing an anonymous administration official.
Kennedy, an eminent vaccination skeptic, has taken several measures to modify vaccination policy in the United States
Monarez, a long -standing federal government scientist, was sworn in on July 31. She is the first director of the CDC to be confirmed by the Senate following a new law adopted during the pandemic which obliged the legislators to approve the candidates for the role.
At least four other senior health officials announced on Wednesday that they left the agency shortly after the Health and Social Services Department said that Monarez was “no longer” CDC in an article on X.
In an interview on Fox News on Thursday, Kennedy refused to comment on “personnel issues”. But he said that the agency “was in difficulty, and we have to repair it, and we repair it, and some people may no longer work there.”
He said Trump has “hopes very, very ambitious for the CDC at the moment”. But Kennedy said that the CDC “has problems”, saying that the agency has adopted the “bad” approach with regard to social distancing, masking and school closings during the cocovid pandemic.
“If there is really a deeply, deeply integrated discomfort … at the agency, and that we need a solid leadership that will take place and which will be able to execute on the vast ambitions of President Trump for this agency, the science of gold standards and which it was when we grow,” said Kennedy. “We are going to be the most respected health agency in the world.”
Departments of management intervene at a tumultuous moment for the agency, which is in shock from the attack of a shooter against its headquarters in Atlanta on August 8. A police officer died during the shooting.
– Angelica Peebles of CNBC contributed to this report.