Centers for Disease Control Director Susan Monarez has abruptly left the post just weeks after being sworn in, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed on Wednesday.
Why it matters: The career government scientist’s departure is the latest sign of upheaval within the Trump administration’s health bureaucracy.
- Daniel Jernigan, CDC’s director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, also resigned his post on Wednesday, according to an internal email viewed by Axios.
- Requests for comment from HHS and the White House were not immediately returned.
Monarez’s departure comes the same day HHS announced it will limit who is eligible for COVID vaccines.
- During her brief tenure, the agency was targeted in an attack on its Atlanta headquarters by a gunman influenced by anti-vaccine rhetoric and moved ahead with hundreds of job cuts.
Between the lines: Monarez was confirmed to the job on July 29 after being nominated in May by President Trump after the president’s previous pick Dave Weldon was pulled.
- She walked a fine line during hearings in her support for vaccines while not contradicting HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Catch up quick: Her departure continued a series of abrupt personnel changes throughout federal health agencies that saw FDA’s lead vaccine regulator Vinay Prasad return to his post earlier this month after he unexpectedly departed in late July.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/trump-s-cdc-director-ousted-in-stunning-departure/ar-AA1LlBv4
Donald Trump and his administration suffered two major legal setbacks as federal judges in California and Rhode Island ruled against key policies pursued by the White House.
In California, U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer Thurston ordered the release of Salam Maklad, a Syrian national from the Druze religious minority, who had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers earlier this summer.
In Rhode Island, Senior District Judge William Smith blocked the administration from imposing new restrictions on domestic violence funding programs connected to the president’s recent executive order targeting what he described as “gender ideology.” Details of both rulings were shared by Politico’s legal affairs reporter, Kyle Cheney, on X.
With Republicans in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, the judiciary has become a critical check on Trump’s agenda. Courts have previously halted efforts to penalize law firms representing cases against Trump, blocked attempts to revoke protections for Haitian migrants and struck down sanctions aimed at employees of the International Criminal Court. The California case centered on Maklad, who entered the United States in 2002 without valid documentation and applied for asylum. Court records show she later married a man who was granted asylum, which her legal team argued made her eligible for legal immigration status. ICE recently detained her after she attended what she believed was a routine “check-in” meeting and subsequently placed her in expedited removal proceedings and threatened her with deportation. Thurston emphasized Maklad’s clean record and lack of flight risk, writing that “the balance of the equities and public interest weigh in favor of Ms. Maklad.”
The judge ordered her release and barred authorities from rearresting her without “compliance with constitutional protections, which include, at a minimum, pre-deprivation notice — describing the change of circumstances necessitating her arrest — and detention, and a timely bond hearing.” Thurston further ruled that “Respondents are PERMANENTLY ENJOINED AND RESTRAINED from rearresting or re-detaining Ms. Maklad absent compliance with constitutional protections. … At any such hearing, the Government SHALL bear the burden of establishing, by clear and convincing evidence, that Ms. Maklad poses a danger to the community or a risk of flight, and Ms. Maklad SHALL be allowed to have her counsel present.”
On the same day, Judge Smith ruled against the administration in a case tied to President Trump’s Executive Order 14168, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The directive, issued earlier this year, declared that sex is an “immutable biological classification as male or female” and instructed federal agencies to “prioritize investigations and litigation to enforce the rights and freedoms” tied to this definition.
Following the order, the Office on Violence Against Women revised its grant policy in May 2025 to prohibit funding for “inculcating or promoting gender ideology.” A coalition of 17 nonprofit groups challenged the restrictions, arguing they undermined their work with survivors of domestic violence. Judge Smith sided with the organizations, ruling that the new requirements “could result in the disruption” of critical services for victims of sexual and domestic violence. Together, the rulings marked another day of judicial pushback against the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape immigration enforcement and federal gender policy.
President Donald Trump on Monday said he would target former President Joe Biden’s circle, calling them “evil people.”
“There were some brilliant people,” Trump said, referring to Biden’s allies in his White House. “But they’re evil people, and they’re going to be brought down. They have to be brought down ’cause they really hurt our country.”
Trump’s threat to have his political opponent’s allies “brought down” marks his latest move to potentially target political adversaries in a pattern that has alarmed critics who paint the president as pursuing retribution and say he is weaponizing the Justice Department — a claim the president has made about the Biden administration.
Biden’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump made the comments during lengthy remarks in the Oval Office, where the president and his allies made a series of claims about the impact of his anti-crime efforts in D.C. and top officials took turns heaping praise on him. While signing executive orders that aim to do away with cash bail, Trump repeatedly focused on the murder rate in the city, saying it had not seen a single person killed in 11 days — a change that he has been brandishing in recent days as he touts his administration’s efforts to address D.C. crime. That push has included federalizing the D.C. police force, deploying the National Guard and stepping up the federal law enforcement presence in the city.
Trump claimed that it has been “many years” since D.C. went a week without a murder. Publicly available crime data from the Metropolitan Police Department, however, indicate that D.C. went 16 days without a murder earlier this year, from Feb. 25 to March 12.
Trump argued that the city’s restaurants are experiencing a “boomtown,” a comment that is uncertain, as restaurant employees in a D.C. neighborhood with a large immigrant community told NBC News last week that business was declining due to Trump’s policies. His deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who attended the signing with Vice President JD Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, claimed that people in D.C. had resumed wearing jewelry and carrying purses because of Trump’s anti-crime push.
“They’re wearing jewelry again. They’re carrying purses again,” Miller said. “People had changed their whole lives in this city for fear of being murdered, mugged and carjacked. It is a literal statement that President Trump has freed 700,000 people in this city who were living under the rule of criminals and thugs.”
At the start of the operation, though, crime in D.C. was down 26% compared to last year. Many city residents, too, have slammed the deployments and said it is scaring Washingtonians.
The president has frequently claimed that Democrats weaponized the Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies against him, pointing to his criminal indictments related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents, as well as his conviction related to falsifying business records, which were dropped when he was elected to a second term. Trump repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in the cases against him.
Democrats have gone after Trump’s comments, arguing that the Trump administration’s several investigations into his political foes constitute the exact weaponization that he claimed they pursued against him.
The Justice Department is investigating Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and New York Attorney General Letitia James on allegations of mortgage fraud.
James led a civil fraud case against Trump, and Schiff served as the lead House manager in Trump’s first impeachment trial. They denied any wrongdoing.
NBC News has also previously reported that the Justice Department is in the initial stages of an investigation into James’ handling of her civil fraud case against Trump, which her attorney likened to a “political retribution campaign.”
Trump also threatened Friday to fire a Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook, if she did not resign after facing separate accusations of mortgage fraud. Cook said she won’t step down.
On Monday night, Trump said he was removing Cook from her post. Trump has been highly critical of the Federal Reserve for not adjusting interest rates as he would like.
And late last week, the FBI searched the home of former national security adviser John Bolton. A source familiar with the matter told NBC News at the time that the search was part of a “national security investigation in search of classified records.” Bolton did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment Friday.
Also on Monday, Trump left the door open to investigating former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a staunch critic of Trump who was among the Republicans who ran against him for president. Trump was referring to a 12-year-old scandal called “Bridgegate.“
“If they want to look at it, they can,” Trump said, responding to a question about whether the White House planned to investigate Christie. “You can ask Pam. I think we have other things to do, but I always thought he got away with murder.”
On Sunday, after Christie criticized him on ABC News’ “This Week,” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social, “For the sake of JUSTICE, perhaps we should start looking at that very serious situation again?”
Meanwhile, Trump’s allies in Congress have pushed to hear testimony from Biden’s circle about his mental acuity while in office, which Trump and Republicans claim was in decline but was covered up by the former president’s team. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has sought testimony from Biden’s former White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor and former White House aides, including his domestic policy adviser, Neera Tanden and his deputy chief of staff, Annie Tomasini.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/-going-brought-trump-vows-go-bidens-advisers-rcna227019
California “bluffed” its way into flipping the script on Republicans and Donald Trump, according to a new report.
Politico on Saturday published a story called, How California bluffed its way into a redistricting war with Trump, in which the outlet quotes “nearly 50 people involved with the effort” who “shared details with POLITICO about the tightly guarded process.”
California is currently in the process of potentially altering its district maps in response to Texas’ redistricting. But it started off as a “bluff,” according to reporters.
“When word got out that Texas might undertake an extraordinary mid-decade redistricting at Donald Trump’s behest, a handful of top California Democratic operatives floated an idea to Rep. Zoe Lofgren: Could California respond in kind?” according to the weekend report. “Lofgren, the chair of California’s 43-member Democratic delegation, consulted in June with a trusted data expert who dismissed it as absurd — a foolhardy end-run around the state’s popular redistricting panel with no guarantee of yielding enough blue seats to fully offset Texas. Deterred by those misgivings, California Democrats instead spent weeks putting up a front, dangling the threat of a countermove without making any real plans to do so.”
The piece quotes Lofgren as saying, “It seemed to me worth a bluff… If the Texans and Trump thought they’d go through all of this and they’d end up not gaining anything, maybe they would stop.”
She then added, “But they didn’t stop… They just doubled down.”
However, the bluff soon met reality.
“So did California Democrats, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom. In a matter of weeks, they bluffed themselves into the marquee political contest of Trump’s second term, a high-voltage fight to shape the outcome of the 2026 midterms and the remaining years of his presidency,” according to the outlet.
Summing up, the reporters wrote, “In the end, 87 of 90 Democrats voted to put the maps on the ballot — a display of consensus that [Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas] said was made possible by the California-under-siege mentality that had been building up ever since Trump re-took the White House.”
“It’s Whac-a-mole. We’ve been trying to play defense,” Rivas reportedly added. “But we finally just threw up our hands and said, ‘We’ve got to flip the script.’”
