Helen Branswell and Daniel Payne , 2025-05-20 22:40:00
Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester has written a stinging letter to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. demanding that he clarify whether the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has an acting director.
In her three-page missive, Blunt Rochester suggested that Matthew Buzzelli, the person Kennedy said was the CDC’s acting director, cannot hold the role because he isn’t qualified under the federal Vacancies Act.
It “appears that Mr. Buzzelli is both unqualified and legally ineligible to act as Acting Director of the CDC in any capacity, and indeed he does not appear to be performing key aspects of the position,” said Blunt Rochester, a Democrat who is the junior senator for Delaware.
Leaving the public health agency without a leader jeopardizes the health of Americans, Blunt Rochester wrote on Tuesday.
“Let me be clear: the absence of a CDC Director is a serious public health risk,” she wrote. “The Director of the CDC has the sole authority to make critical decisions that affect millions of Americans.”
During his appearance last week before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, Kennedy told Blunt Rochester that the acting CDC director was “Matt Buzzelli,” who he described as a “public health expert.”
Buzzelli’s biography on the CDC’s website lists no public health experience whatsoever; his background is as a trial lawyer. The webpage does not name him as acting director of the Atlanta-based agency, calling him instead the chief of staff.
Anne Joseph O’Connell, a law professor at Stanford University and an expert on the Vacancies Act, concurred with Blunt Rochester that Buzzelli is not qualified to fill the role of acting CDC director.
O’Connell said that under the act, the position of acting director would by default go to the first assistant, who at the CDC would be Debra Houry, deputy director for program and science and the agency’s chief medical officer. Blunt Rochester asked Kennedy to explain why Houry had not been the one named acting director.
The Vacancies Act allows for someone else to be named acting director, under specific circumstances, and only then if the president names the individual to the position. The job can be filled by someone who was confirmed by the Senate for another position but even then must be someone who served at the agency or department in question for at least 90 days in the year before the vacancy came open.
There is no evidence that President Trump has named Buzzelli to be acting CDC director. Buzzelli has not been Senate-confirmed for another position. And he joined the CDC at some point in mid-February; staff were informed of his hiring on Feb. 18. O’Connell said to qualify, he would have had to have worked at the CDC for 90 days before the previous director, Mandy Cohen, finished her tenure at noon on Jan. 20, the day of Trump’s inauguration.
Early in the new administration Susan Monarez, a career civil servant with a biosecurity background, was named acting director of the agency. But when the nomination of former Florida congressman Dave Weldon was withdrawn hours before his confirmation hearing in mid-March, she was tapped for the job. A nominee cannot serve as an acting director of the agency or department he or she has been named to lead.
O’Connell said Buzzelli can run the agency, doing most of the tasks that would normally fall to a director. But there are some responsibilities that can only be conducted by a director or acting director, which he would not legally be eligible to do. Among them: Approving or rejecting vaccine recommendations from CDC’s expert panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
That committee passed six recommendations when it met in April; Kennedy quietly adopted three of them last week. The other three, related to a new meningitis vaccine and expansion of the use of vaccines to protect older adults from respiratory syncytial virus, remain in limbo.
In her letter, Blunt Rochester took Kennedy to task for not informing the country of who is leading the CDC.
“Though you promised radical transparency as a hallmark of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under your leadership, you did not disclose the identity of our country’s leading public health official until asked in public testimony, and the CDC itself will still not confirm if Mr. Buzzelli is, as you directly testified, Acting Director,” she wrote.
Blunt Rochester gave Kennedy one day to respond, asking for more information by Wednesday, including whether Buzzelli is currently acting director. She also asked Kennedy for proof of his legal eligibility for the role, information about any formal actions he’s taken as acting director — including adopting ACIP recommendations — and a commitment to timely information about filling other high-level vacancies.
The request comes as Senate Democrats are increasingly pressing the health secretary for more information about the shakeup at HHS — and urging their Republican colleagues to hold the administration officials accountable.
Despite Kennedy assuring senators over three hearings that he would work with them on their concerns, many requests from Democrats to HHS have gone unanswered, according to spokespeople in their offices. When Kennedy appeared before congressional committees, he made claims at odds with widespread reports, some of which caome from within his own agency, about the repercussions of staffing and funding cuts.
Pressed on details of the reorganization across the federal health agencies, Kennedy told senators he had been advised by attorneys to not discuss the matter — or said he would look into the issues and come back with answers.
“There’s no way to govern this agency,” Kennedy told senators Tuesday, complaining about the size and redundancies in HHS. “If somebody does not reorganize this mess, it is going to continue. And we’re trying to do it — and we’re going to make some mistakes as we do it.”
