The CDC Finally Has a Confirmed Director Again. The Vote Was 51-44, and Only One Democrat Said Yes.

WASHINGTON — The Senate confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday by a vote of 51 to 44, ending a leadership vacuum that has stretched across nearly a year at the country's front-line disease agency.

The vote fell almost entirely along party lines. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia was the only Democrat to vote in favor. Schwartz becomes the first Black woman to run the CDC in the agency's history.

She inherits an institution that has been operating without a Senate-confirmed leader since late August 2025, when Susan Monarez was ousted 29 days after taking the job. Monarez later testified that she was pushed out because she refused to endorse vaccine recommendations from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that she said were not grounded in science. Since February, the CDC has been run on an acting basis by Jay Bhattacharya, who simultaneously holds the directorship of the National Institutes of Health — an arrangement that left the world's largest biomedical research agency and the nation's outbreak-response agency sharing a single chief executive.

Schwartz arrives with a resume built almost entirely inside the uniformed public health service rather than academic epidemiology. A retired Navy rear admiral, she served as deputy surgeon general of the United States and spent years overseeing the health care system for the U.S. Coast Guard. She holds a bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering and an M.D., both from Brown University, and a law degree from the University of Maryland. According to the Department of Homeland Security, she worked on the federal response to outbreaks including Ebola and H1N1 influenza.

The Ebola experience is immediately relevant. Schwartz takes over as an Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo continues to spread, with African public health officials publicly warning that contact tracing has broken down. Any U.S. technical support to that response — laboratory capacity, epidemiological surge staff, case-definition guidance — routes through the agency she now runs.

The harder problem is internal. The CDC's scientific independence has been the central point of friction with Kennedy's HHS, and the same senators who voted against Schwartz spent her confirmation hearings pressing her on whether she would sign off on vaccine schedules her career scientists opposed. Her predecessor's answer to that question is why the job was open. Schwartz declined during the confirmation process to commit in advance to any specific outcome, saying she would follow the evidence. She now has to demonstrate what that means in practice, at an agency where the staff has watched one director get removed for saying it.