Trump's Trials - Can the CDC respond to public health threats without a director?

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

NPR's Michel Martin speaks with former CDC official Demetre Daskalakis about the absence of a CDC director and the government's ability to respond to public health threats.Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Trump's terms. I'm Scott Detrow. President Trump promised every single American that he would make America safe again. Every single day in the Oval Office, the president looks at us and says, why haven't we done more? This will be an entirely different country in a short period of time. Every episode, we bring you one story from NPR's recent coverage of the 47th president. With a focus on ways his administration is pushing the boundaries of presidential power. Here's the latest from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin.

And I'm Lela Fauden. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not have a director. The former interim director, Jay Batacharya, has exceeded the time he was legally allowed to lead the CDC. The White House has not nominated anyone new to run the public health agency, which predicts and helps control the spread of disease. But Acharya also directs the National Institutes of Health. The Trump administration says he will keep leading the CDC two just without the title. We wanted to consider what the impact might be from someone who knows the agency well. So we've called Dr. Dmitri Daskalakis.

He was a top CDC scientist until he resigned last summer over the firing of the CDC's last confirmed director. Dr. Descalascus, thanks so much for talking to us. Thank you so much for having me. So it's not just that the director's chair will be, well, they say it won't be empty, but it won't be filled with a confirmed director. It turns out that a lot of leadership roles at CDC are empty, including your former position as head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. And I was wondering, does the fact that there aren't leaders in place at these jobs change what the CDC can do? So the short answer is that leadership vacuums at CDC that are brief are something that you can deal with.

But when they're this long, what happens is the ship starts to feel a little rudderless. like it doesn't have a captain. Can you give me an example of how leadership makes a difference? Just say, for example, in your former division for immunization and respiratory diseases, how does the lack of a leader in an agency like that make a difference? Yeah, how's measles? That's probably a good one. In my center, I have measles experts, but being the leader of the center means that you're

able to contextualize the work that they're doing. So, you know, when the West Wing calls and says, we want to know what's going on with measles, they generally call the CDC director who needs to have connectivity down deeper into the organization to be able to answer those questions with authority. So you need to have that leadership, that scientific leadership to make sure that you're delivering on what the mission is of your center and ultimately of the agency. If you cared about an agency so important to the health of America, you would prioritize identifying a leader and installing them. So while the CDC is director less, Can the public trust the data and the research coming out of the CDC right now?

So the problem is if you can't trust some of it, can you trust any of it, right? So I think it's fair to say that some of the things coming out of CDC around immunization and vaccines, around race and ethnicity, you have to take those worth of grain of salt now because they've been influenced by ideology. So I think that at the end of the day, you have to look at your clinician. So if you have a doctor, they're professional organizations, and frankly, the local health departments, whether it's state or city or county, because they now have been given the very hard work of differentiating the signal from noise that's coming out of HHS. HHS is saying that Dr. J. Badacharya is still running the agency. He will be running the agency. He will be functioning in that role, but without the title. Does that not give you any comfort at all? That the work still will be.

done? I don't know Dr. Bodicelli, personally. So I imagine that he has infinite capacity, but you know, seemingly he has a large vacuum of leaders at NIH with a very similar story with many of the institutes unstaffed by permanent leaders, very similar to what you're seeing at CDC with the center directors and other offices. So I don't see that it's possible for a human to indefinitely cover both of these roles and expect that there's going to be success in either. That is, Dr. Dmitri Descalakis, he was a top scientist at the CDC until he resigned last summer. He is now the chief medical officer of the Callumlord Community Health Center in New York. Dr. Descalaccus, thanks so much for sharing these insights with us.

Thank you so much. We reached out to the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House for comment on the leadership vacancies. HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon wrote that both the CDC and NIH continue to fulfill their missions and the search for a new CDC director is ongoing. Before we wrap up a reminder, you can find more coverage of the Trump administration on the NPR Politics podcast, where you can hear NPR's political reporters break down the day's biggest political news with new episodes every weekday afternoon. And thanks, as always, to our NPR Plus supporters who hear every episode of the show without sponsor messages. You can learn more at plus.npr.org.

I'm Scott Detrow. Thanks for listening to Trump's terms from NPR. Thank you.