President Trump plans to appoint the Georgia state public health commissioner, Brenda Fitzgerald, as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the Washington Post. Fitzgerald is president-elect of the organization representing public health agencies and “has strong ties to Republican leaders,” including Health Secretary Tom Price, a former Georgia congressman, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, said the newspaper.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also has reported Fitzgerald was the front-runner for the post. An obstretician-gynocologist, she would succeed Tom Frieden, who left the CDC with the arrival of the Trump administration. Fitzgerald has been Georgia public health commissioner since 2011, when the state health department became a stand-alone agency, said the Post. “Within CDC, Fitzgerald’s actions will be watched closely to discern whether she will allow politics to overrule science — as other Trump administration officials have been accused of doing — and whether she will be able to advocate effectively in Washington.”
Trump has proposed a $1.2 billion cut in CDC funding, “which health experts warned could hamper the agency’s disease-fighting efforts and immunization programs,” said the Journal-Constitution. The CDC has headquarters in Atlanta and employs thousands of people in the area.