NIH Director Bhattacharya to Temporarily Lead CDC Amid Agency Turmoil

National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya will take on leadership of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on an acting basis, a Trump administration official confirmed. Bhattacharya will continue to run NIH while also leading the CDC.

Bhattacharya is taking the role after the previous acting director, Health and Human Services Department Deputy Secretary Jim O'Neill, exited the department. O'Neill will be nominated to run the National Science Foundation, the administration official said.

Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor who gained prominence as a leading critic of lockdowns and widespread COVID-19 restrictions, already leads the nation's premier medical research agency, based in Maryland, where he oversees a nearly $50 billion budget and funding for thousands of scientific projects. He is now tasked with also leading the Atlanta-based CDC, which tracks and responds to domestic and foreign threats to public health. Roughly two-thirds of its budget provides funds to the public health and prevention activities of state and local health agencies.

Per federal law, Bhattacharya can serve as acting CDC director only until late March unless Trump nominates a full-time nominee to the U.S. Senate. The law requires Trump to nominate a replacement within 210 days of the previous director's firing, which took place in late August, and changing the acting director does not restart the clock. The 210-day limit is paused, however, as long as a nomination is pending in the Senate, allowing Bhattacharya or another acting director to remain while the confirmation process unfolds.

Bhattacharya will be the third leader the public health agency has had since summer. Susan Monarez, who was confirmed by the Senate, led the CDC for 28 days before she was fired by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after she refused to preemptively sign off on vaccine policy. After her ouster, O'Neill became acting director. O'Neill signed off on changes to reduce the number of recommended pediatric vaccines.

The CDC has faced significant instability, including budget cuts, staff reductions, and controversies under Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist. President Donald Trump fired then-CDC Director Susan Monarez in August after she resisted changes to vaccine policy advanced by Kennedy that she believed contradicted scientific evidence, further destabilizing the already embattled agency. Her dismissal triggered the resignations of four senior CDC officials.

Under O'Neill's tenure, the CDC eliminated long-standing vaccine guidance for children in January and approved an advisory panel's recommendation against early use of a combined measles-mumps-rubella-varicella vaccine in October. The advisory panel had been gutted then restaffed by Kennedy with handpicked, vocal vaccine opponents.

Only 47% of Americans say they trust the CDC at least "a fair amount" to provide reliable vaccine information, down 12 percentage points since the beginning of Trump's second administration.

Kennedy announced wider changes to his team on Thursday, including the elevation of Chris Klomp as chief counselor at HHS tasked to oversee all operations of the department. Klomp currently serves as Deputy Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as well as Director of Medicare. Kennedy said he would retain his roles at CMS. Kennedy also announced that Kyle Diamantas and Grace Graham will serve as senior counselors for the Food and Drug Administration and John Brooks as senior counselor for CMS.

The new HHS roles are meant to increase communication between the department and the White House ahead of the 2026 midterm election, an administration official explained. White House officials, Cabinet secretaries, and Republican campaign operatives met in Washington on Tuesday for a briefing on the party's midterm campaign, according to a person who attended. Republicans plan to focus, in part, on healthcare insurance costs, prescription drug affordability, and by having Kennedy focus on access to healthy food.