CERES, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 16: California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks during a news conference at Gemperle Orchard on April 16, 2025 in Ceres, California. Governor Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta have filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the Trump administration's use of emergency powers to enact sweeping tariffs that hurt states, consumers, and businesses. The tariffs have disrupted supply chains, increased costs for the state and Californians, and inflicted billions in damages on California’s economy, the fifth largest in the world. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Sacramento, California – Gavin Newsom is building his own public health government — and he’s staffing it with scientists Donald Trump pushed out.
The California governor announced Tuesday that he has appointed two former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention leaders who left the agency after clashes with the Trump administration to senior roles in a new state initiative designed to modernize public health and blunt the federal rollback of scientific safeguards.
Dr. Susan Monarez, the former CDC director fired less than a month into the job, will take a leading role in California’s newly created Public Health Network Innovation Exchange, or PHNIX. Joining her is Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s former chief medical officer, who resigned after Monarez’s dismissal.
Both women became public critics of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine policies and testified before Congress in September about what they described as the dismantling of the nation’s public health infrastructure.
Now they’ve landed in Sacramento.
PHNIX, according to Newsom’s office, is meant to modernize California’s public health system while directly countering the Trump administration’s embrace of vaccine skepticism and its reshaping of federal health agencies. The initiative will focus on technology development, modernizing data systems, and rethinking public health funding frameworks.
“The Public Health Network Innovation Exchange is expected to bring together the best science, the best tools, and the best minds to advance public health,” Newsom said in a statement. He added that the goal is to restore trust and stability in scientific data not only across California, but nationally and globally.
Monarez will serve as a strategic adviser on health technology and funding, while Houry will hold the title of senior regional and global public health medical adviser.
Their appointments are deeply political, whether Newsom says so outright or not.
Monarez was fired in August after refusing to step down as CDC director, following disputes with Kennedy over vaccine policy and the administration’s direction for the agency. Houry, who spent a decade at the CDC, resigned soon after, signaling that the internal rupture had gone far beyond a single leadership fight.
Newsom, meanwhile, has positioned California as the clearest institutional counterweight to Trump’s second-term agenda. Since Trump returned to office, Newsom has signed executive orders to fast-track the hiring of laid-off federal employees, joined regional health alliances, and framed California as a firewall against federal overreach.
The hiring of Monarez and Houry fits neatly into that strategy: turn Washington’s chaos into California’s advantage.
It also feeds speculation about Newsom’s national ambitions. With his gubernatorial term ending in 2027 and term limits barring another run, Newsom has openly acknowledged he is considering a presidential bid in 2028, though he says he will wait until after the 2026 midterms to decide.
For now, the message is unmistakable. As the Trump administration remakes federal health policy in its own image, Newsom is constructing a parallel infrastructure — one that treats scientific dissent not as a firing offense, but as a qualification.
In Trump’s Washington, these scientists were expendable.
In Newsom’s California, they’re the foundation.
