How the next CDC director could reshape America’s $5.3 trillion health care industry

After a long hunt for the next CDC director, former Deputy Surgeon General Erica Schwartz officially got the nomination on April 16. But in the $5.3 trillion healthcare industry that makes up 18% of the country’s GDP, what sort of impact can just one job really have? Especially considering how the Trump administration has made major shifts that have impacted how federal agencies are used and viewed over the last year and a half. Experts told us the role can shape the healthcare industry and the future of patient care as it did during the Covid-19 pandemic and AIDS epidemic. And as the industry has already seen in policy changes like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s cuts to Medicaid, it also has the power to hinder how the industry is able to operate and can stymie potential progress. According to David Dodd, president and CEO of drug company GeoVax, the CDC director has a few levers they can pull to yield power over healthcare: guidance to shape clinical practice, data on and surveillance of real-time disease intelligence, and instilling public trust. “The CDC director doesn’t just guide public health—she/he shapes the conditions that determine whether scientific innovation actually reaches and protects people at scale,” he said. The ‘unfillable seat.’ Before Schwartz was nominated, the CDC director role over the last year looked like an “unfillable seat” that recent nominees seemed to have found “untenable,” Eric Perakslis, chief science and data officer at data company Pluto Health, told Healthcare Brew. That may be because scientists’ relationships with the federal government are shifting, experts told us. Perakslis believes scientists under the Trump administration have found that “non-science-based interference” has become “too much.” While the structural authority of the role hasn’t changed, the “visibility and pressure surrounding it” has, Dodd added. Clinician impact. According to Dodd, the levers the CDC influences don’t “mandate markets,” and instead they