Behind the Choice for CDC Director
President Trump has nominated Susan Monarez for the Director of the CDC. This has sent shock waves through the MAHA community.
BY ROBERT MALONE
View original article at Brownstone.org.
President Trump has nominated Susan Monarez for the Director of the CDC. This has sent shock waves through the MAHA community, as they were expecting a Covid-era celebrity to take up the reins.
To begin, while preparing this essay, out of the blue Secretary Kennedy called me to discuss the nomination of Monarez, so I have firsthand knowledge of the situation. Secretary Kennedy confided in me that he strongly supports her.
He describes her as an administrative dynamo who, as acting CDC director, has been working closely with DOGE, and is doing an excellent job as acting director. For example, there were CDC employees who were obstructing access to important data and key VAERS information. Director Monarez acted promptly to remove these individuals or otherwise take actions required to obtain access to the necessary data. She did so quickly and efficiently.
No surprise, there is a lot of resistance to change at the CDC, and Monarez is taking on and overcoming all obstacles in a prompt and methodical manner. I am shocked, shocked that there is so much resistance to oversight and reform <sarcasm>.
In any case, don’t judge a book by its cover. If the MAHA agenda is to succeed, it will need people like Monarez to lead in key administrative positions. That is, it will require more than popular influencers. It needs people with years of high-level security clearance experience who understand the bureaucracy and how to navigate the rules and regulations so they do not get bogged down in the courts.
The energetic Monarez may be just what the doctor (or perhaps surgeon would be a better metaphor) ordered for treating a very sick CDC.
Let’s just focus on the facts and her CV for a moment. You can make your own assessment and draw your own conclusions from there.
Who is Dr. Monarez?
Monarez obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where her research focused on infectious disease technologies, particularly those affecting low- and middle-income countries. She then did a postdoc at Stanford University School of Medicine, focusing on infectious disease research.
Despite this research background, PubMed only lists one publication, a recently published paper, under her name. So, she is an administrator, not a researcher. Given her years in government, her skills in management clearly are what she excels at.
Monarez was a Fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She then held roles in the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the US National Security Council, where her work included initiatives to combat antimicrobial resistance, expand wearable technology for health monitoring, and improve pandemic preparedness efforts (that would include biodefense). She worked in the Obama, Trump 1.0, and Biden White Houses. During Trump’s first term, she held health technology and biosecurity roles, including positions at the Department of Homeland Security and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. So, she was already known to the Trump Chief of Staff team of Susie Wiles.
At the US Department of Homeland Security, Monarez served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategy and Data Analytics, where she oversaw the research portfolios for the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA) and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). More spooky stuff.
In January 2023, Monarez was appointed Deputy Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), where she led initiatives to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance health outcomes. Under her direction, the ARPA-H program included research on healthcare accessibility and affordability, expanding mental health interventions, combating the opioid epidemic in the United States, and maternal health “disparities.” Much of her research has been focused on DEI-related research and health outcomes. However, I believe it is likely her work with artificial intelligence-related solutions applied to public health that has propelled her through the ranks to be nominated first as acting Director and then as Director of the CDC.
Monarez became Acting Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Acting Administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry on January 23, 2025, after being named as the agency’s Principal Deputy Director. She was nominated on March 24, 2025, to be the new CDC director.
Will she survive the Nomination Process?
I predict that she will garner bipartisan, overwhelming support from the Senate and her nomination will be smooth sailing. Remember, she first worked for Obama and Biden, so the Democrats and the administrative state love her. There is a lot of speculation that she has strong ties to intelligence, and she worked in biodefense, so the Warhawks will adore her. As I wrote above, I predict support for her will be overwhelming from both sides of the aisle.
She was selected to head the CDC because of her work with AI. The use of AI applied to VAERS and MMWR will be critical in overhauling the adverse events reporting system. I speculate that Sec. Robert Kennedy, Jr. went along because she has the skillset to apply a team of AI experts to MMWR and VAERS and is already working with DOGE. The recent cabinet meeting most likely included thoughts on her nomination. Frankly, this is a candidate that Musk would support.
What about Kennedy?
I can’t see President Trump blindsiding Kennedy on this nomination – it is too big.
However, given her background, I can see why Kennedy might not object to her nomination, and given her progress and achievements to date as acting CDC director, why he would be enthusiastic about this appointment. He gave her a two-month tryout and she passed. Remember always that the goal is getting the job done, not just rewarding people for having been right in the past.
Countless agency heads have come and gone in past administrations and they have been predictably eaten alive by systems they do not understand. This is what Washington has always counted on: just wait it out and the bureaucracy wins every time.
The Trump administration and RFK, Jr., have a different plan in mind. As with Kash Patel at the FBI, as with OMB and many other agencies, this administration favors people with real experience and a determination to get the job done.
 | A guest post by
|
Why do MAHA people have reason to be concerned about a spook-adjacent bureaucrat being made head of the CDC? a bureaucrat whose main interest is using AI to make decisions for us?
Malone mentions “Machine Learning” AI above. That would be an appropriate tool to apply to an enormous dataset to find patterns in the data that people have otherwise missed. ML is good if you already pretty much know what you’re looking for and the data is quantifiable.
However, no one with a pulse glancing at the VAERS data can miss the safety signal with vaccines. We don’t have a problem that we can’t find the suggestive patterns. The problem is the CDC hasn’t allowed anyone to properly interpret them.
Applying Machine Learning AI to the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) might find some previously unsuspected or unproven correlations between disease and treatments, toxins and/or life style factors. But again, most of these patterns have already been discovered by clinical research. Using Machine Learning AI might help those on the MAHA team make their arguments more confidently.
I imagine Bobby wants to apply AI — not generative AI (ChatBots) but machine learning AI — to the big datasets to try to strengthen his arguments about the causes of chronic disease. That’s all good.
But, as I have argued on my stack, the concern is that we are being shepherded toward technocractic rule, wherein, instead of bureaucrats and politicians making decisions about how to manage the flock, generative AI will make the decisions. AI technocracy proponents claim that generative AI can be more “objective” and can find the “best” way to win the game, just like it had found the best ways to win the game of Go.
In my stack, I have thoroughly ridiculed people making such assertions, e.g., Elon Musk, Aza Raskin, Tristan Harris, and Joe Rogan. Recently, Naomi Wolf added her voice to the chorus of those fear-mongering that generative AI will soon become more “intelligent” than people.
I am on Naomi’s side as she warns about the dangers of all our data being collected and correlated by private entities to train their own generative AI. I disagree with her that a “sovereign AI,” controlled by the government, would be better. It doesn’t matter who controls the AI, it is an essentially useless tool for that job, regardless of who wields it. Our government is our servant, not our master. We need to stop any bureaucrat who suggests that all we need is a government that makes better decisions on our behalf.
On March 18, I was disappointed in Naomi when Shannon Joy mentioned my arguments that AI won’t ever be “intelligent,” and Naomi unhelpfully regurgitated the marketing she’s been fed, “It’s my understanding that there is going to be a point at which AI is essentially thinking for itself… I’ve been around enough people who are on the inside of creating and distributing the AI of the near future. What Elon Musk is saying is not unusual or just his point of view; it’s kind of the consensus. I heard from the AI specialist at Microsoft [at a recent conference in India]…I heard from a guy who’s at the center for AI at Harvard, a guy from Deloitte who specializes in AI futures…” Consider the source of this consensus opinion, Naomi.
Naomi probably fears that this new super human intelligent generative AI (which hasn’t appeared yet and there is no sign that it will) will be used as a tool by the elite to carry out their dastardly biomedical security plans on us. She is right insofar as any powerful tool applied by the wrong people will lead to harm. But she is wrong to believe that generative AI will become more intelligent that humans— indeed intelligent at all.
Generative AI is only a glorified predictive text search engine that can mimic human communications. Its responses to prompts are probabilistic. It does not perform logical operations and it cannot perform creative or critical thinking and never will. My Substack is dedicated to explaining why this is so, but I think anyone who has tested these ChatBots understands this.
If Susan Monarez has the same dream that all those at the spook agencies have had since the Total Informational Awareness program was launched, she wants to promote the idea that we can “fix” government by allowing generative AI to make decisions about how to govern the population. The Total Information Awareness program was scrapped when the spooks realized it violates our constitutional rights to collect data on us. And so, Palantir was created by the CIA to collect the data. They think (wrongly, due to the limits on prediction of the behavior of non-linear complex systems) that more and more Big Data will finally improve generative AI’s capabilities such that it will be able to make accurate predications — and therefore, will be able to make the “best” decisions and control the public through legislative acts in the best way possible.
In truth, however, I suspect those high-level spooks aren’t stupid. They know that generative AI is just a predictive text engine, not a prophet. But they want the public to believe that AI can be more objective and less corrupt that a human bureaucracy, so that they can institute a new form of government: technocracy.
The remedy to this is to convince the public that everything that is being said about generative AI is hype. I’ve been doing my best.
The solution to this problem is also to stop allowing those in government to think of us as sheep who need bureaucrats —whether human or AI — to make decisions for us. A society wherein the people make fully informed decisions for themselves is the best society. The discoveries of the complexity sciences back in the 1980s and 1990s told us this. Top down control is dumb. We have never reformed our political theories of appropriate governance based on what we now know about non-linear complex systems. We need to do this.
And finally, here’s why Susan Monarez probably wants to look at the VAERS data using Machine Learning. This is my guess, anyway. The Covid-19 shots were a massive experiment on the population. Too many people in biomedical research are convinced that gene therapy will be the way to cure disease and even stop the aging process. (There are various reasons why these people pursuing this goal cannot see that the goal is futile, which I’ve written about in my substack.) The VAERS database is a goldmine of information about how the different formulations of the the different vaccine batches did in the mass experiment. Now they want to use that data, and correlate it with other health records that DOGE has collected, to improve the gene therapy platform.
I think Monarez is trying to leverage Bobby’s interest in using Machine Learning AI (to make his case about chronic disease) to get at the VAERS/MMWR data to use in to train generative AI to improve the gene therapy platform. In the larger picture, I think Monarez and her spook tech friends hope to train generative AI on all government data — all that DOGE may have collected — to transform generative AI into Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). They will find that it won’t work. Making AGI in the way they are trying to do will fail. But that might not stop them from imposing technocracy on us, if enough of us have been fooled into thinking generative AI can make logical decisions.
Long rant, sorry. My critique of Musk and DOGE is not just knee jerk reactions or caused by TDS. I am thrilled about the possibility of cutting the federal budget down to size. I’m just worried that the Trump Administration will try to replace human bureaucracy with AI bureaucracy. Bureaucracy itself needs to go; we need to think for ourselves.