Amid Biden’s controversy CDC director Rochelle Walensky, Restoring Trust in Public Health Act would require the position be Senate-confirmed
Even the surgeon general is Senate-confirmed, despite being lower on the hierarchy than the CDC director.
Context
About 1,200 positions in presidential administrations required Senate confirmation. Here’s a full list. Most prominently, they include all the Cabinet positions, including the likes of attorney general and secretary of defense.
Other prominent positions don’t require Senate confirmation at all and are instead unilaterally selected by the president themselves. For decades, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a status which has never particularly created controversy.
Until the COVID-19 pandemic, that is. President Joe Biden’s selection, Rochelle Walensky, was previously the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital. During her tenure, the CDC has made decisions that Republicans found controversial, such as extending an eviction moratorium which the conservative Supreme Court later struck down, ruling that the CDC had exceeded its authority.
(The administration’s most recent controversial COVID-related policy decision, a vaccine requirement for employees of large and medium-sized private sector businesses, is actually under the authority of the Labor Department rather than the CDC.)
What the bill does
The Restoring Trust in Public Health Act would make the CDC director a Senate-confirmed position.
It was introduced in the Senate on September 14 as S. 2734, by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).
If this had already been law in 2021, Walensky likely would have been confirmed anyway, given the Democratic-controlled Senate. It’s even likely that some number of Republicans would have confirmed her, too, as she wasn’t particularly controversial until she was actually in office, with very little organized opposition to her selection prior to her appointment. (Most of Biden’s Cabinet picks received some level of Republican support, with a few even receiving substantial support.)
What supporters say
Supporters argue that such an important position should require some level of say from the legislative branch, especially considering the arguably less-important positions which nonetheless require Senate confirmation. For example, the Senate must confirm a whole host of assistant secretaries for various policy areas within various Cabinet departments, but not the actual top person at the CDC.
“The CDC has exerted astonishing power over the everyday lives of millions of Americans, without any say from Congress,” Sen. Lee said in a press release. “This bill will ensure that, through the confirmation process, future directors are qualified, honest, and reasonable. Few agencies need such tempered, rational leadership as much as the CDC.”
“In the past year and a half during a global pandemic, CDC-issued guidance has impacted every American — without input from Congress,” cosponsor Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said in the same press release. “If an individual is going to have such vast and seemingly unchecked power, the CDC director should be a Senate-confirmed role to ensure the American people get a say in the process and that the individual selected has the temperament and qualifications necessary.”
What opponents say
GovTrack Insider was unable to locate any explicit statements of opposition. When the health- and medicine-focused publication STAT reported on the subject in 2020, not a single person they interviewed defended the CDC director’s lack of Senate confirmation.
However, opponents might note that there still remain levers with which the Senate — or Congress more generally — can exert regarding the CDC director. For example, Wallensky has already testified before congressional committees several times already during her first few months on the job.
Odds of passage
The bill has attracted four cosponsors, all Republicans. It awaits a potential vote in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee.
In theory, the bill could easily be bipartisan. However, due to its timing, it’s clear that it was actually introduced as a response to Wallensky specifically. As a result, it has only attained Republican cosponsorship so far, and odds of passage are low in the Democratic-controlled Congress.
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This article was written by GovTrack Insider staff writer Jesse Rifkin.
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