California Hires Former C.D.C. Officials Who Criticized Trump Administration

A former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a former chief medical officer of the agency will advise the state on public health issues.

by · NY Times

Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to announce on Monday that California has hired two former leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who accused the Trump administration of abandoning scientific standards.

One is Susan Monarez, a former director of the C.D.C., who was fired by the White House in late August after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to remove her from her position and she resisted leaving. The other is Dr. Debra Houry, a former chief medical officer of the C.D.C., who quit partly in protest over the firing of Dr. Monarez.

Both will now serve as consultants for the California Department of Public Health.

Mr. Newsom has been working to elevate his national profile as a leading Democratic voice against President Trump, and to position himself for a possible 2028 presidential run. He has tried to make California a Democratic bulwark on the West Coast, and has repeatedly countered moves by the Trump administration.

Dr. Monarez and Dr. Houry gave notable testimony at a tense Senate hearing in September in which Dr. Monarez said she had refused Mr. Kennedy’s demands that she fire top scientists at the agency and approve new vaccine recommendations before seeing evidence to support them.

Dr. Monarez had been at the agency for less than a month when Mr. Kennedy abruptly dismissed her. Dr. Houry was an agency veteran who rose through the ranks to oversee all of the C.D.C.’s centers. She was often the only C.D.C. official included in the Trump administration’s plans for reshaping the agency.

A spokesman for Mr. Kennedy, Andrew Nixon, said in September that Dr. Monarez was fired because she “acted maliciously to undermine the president’s agenda” and that Mr. Kennedy was focused on restoring public trust in the C.D.C. Mr. Nixon did not respond to a request for comment Sunday on California’s announcement.

Dr. Monarez and Dr. Houry began helping California last month with efforts to develop a new initiative called the Public Health Network Innovation Exchange, which Mr. Newsom plans to announce at a news conference on Monday afternoon.

“We’re strengthening collaboration and laying the groundwork for a modern public health infrastructure that will offer trust and stability in scientific data, not just across California, but nationally and globally,” Mr. Newsom said on Sunday in a statement to The New York Times.

The governor has positioned his state as a Democratic counterweight this year by suing federal agencies, redrawing congressional district boundaries to offset Republican moves in Texas, and hiring people who have left the Trump administration.

In October, Mr. Newsom hired Michele Beckwith, a former U.S. attorney in Sacramento who was fired by President Trump hours after she told a Border Patrol chief that he could not indiscriminately arrest people in Northern California. She informed the chief, Gregory Bovino, that a court order prohibited such arrests in her district.

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Mr. Newsom directed his administration earlier this year to recruit federal workers who had been laid off through Mr. Trump’s DOGE downsizing effort, particularly those who worked in the sciences, firefighting or natural resources. The state set up a website in April that was directed at hiring those former federal employees.

Mr. Newsom is barred by term limits from seeking a third term as governor in 2026. So he is thinking strategically as he enters his last full year in office and prepares for a potential run for president in 2028.

“We’ll see him continuing to position himself in a way that makes him relevant on the national stage, while getting the job done at the state level,” said Mark Baldassare, survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California.

In the public health arena, Mr. Newsom’s latest hires build on an earlier effort to create an alliance of West Coast states for vaccine policy. California, Oregon and Washington, all led by Democratic governors, have agreed to work together to review scientific data and make vaccine recommendations independently of the federal government.

Mr. Newsom is also a member of the Governors Public Health Alliance, a coalition of 15 Democratic governors. And California, in September, became the first U.S. state to join the World Health Organization Global Outbreak Alert Response Network, an international effort to track and respond to emerging diseases. It is unclear whether the C.D.C. will continue to participate in the network after Jan. 20, when the United States will formally end its relationship with the W.H.O.

In her new role, Dr. Monarez is expected to advise California health officials on how to modernize the state’s public health infrastructure, including the systems used by medical centers to report emerging outbreaks to the state government. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in the outdated manual systems that many states rely on to transfer information between hospitals and public health agencies.

Dr. Houry said in an interview that her goal was to help California explore ways to develop its own tools — for example, a test for a dangerous new infectious disease — and to share data with other states without needing to rely on federal authorities.

California has entered a one-year contract with Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist who rose to prominence during the Covid pandemic. Dr. Jetelina said her venture, “Your Local Epidemiologist,” aims to ensure that the state’s policies closely reflect residents’ public health concerns, and are communicated clearly to the public.

Dr. Houry said the goal in each case was to complement efforts by the C.D.C., rather than to replace them.

“People may view this as partisan, and they can draw their own conclusions,” she said. “But in my mind, it’s always been about health and populations, and not politics.”

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