Maryland Health Secretary Laura Herrera Scott will leave her role at the end of February after a tumultuous two years and will be replaced by a former Medicare official from President Joe Biden’s administration, Gov. Wes Moore said Thursday.

The state’s health agency had faced tough questions and federal lawsuits related to its handling of state psychiatric hospitals and nursing home inspections during Herrera Scott’s tenure, which she had said followed a prior administration that left “a very broken agency.”

Dr. Meena Seshamani,who most recently led the Medicare program and served as deputy administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, will be Moore’s nominee to lead the Department of Health.

Seshamani would assume the position on April 8 if confirmed by the Maryland Senate, which is controlled by Democrats and has confirmed all of Moore’s other cabinet members. Ryan B. Morgan, a deputy secretary for health care financing, will serve as acting secretary after Herrera Scott departs on Feb. 28.

“Dr. Meena Seshamani is among the nation’s top health leaders — with an extraordinary career spanning expertise in public service, medical practice, economics, academia, and advocacy,” Moore said in a statement. “She has made our nation’s health care system fairer, more affordable, and more accessible to all — including our most vulnerable, from families in poverty to communities with disabilities. We thank her for raising her hand to serve in this new role.”

Moore credited Herrera Scott with leading negotiations to create Maryland’s AHEAD model to lower healthcare costs for Marylanders while improving health overall.

“She implemented programs to address infectious and chronic disease threats across the state,” the release reads. “She also assembled a dedicated team to strengthen the department’s operations to better serve some of the state’s most vulnerable populations.”

Her departure follows two years in which rising health care costs and the department’s underestimations for needed funds in areas like Medicaid and the Developmental Disabilities Administration have contributed to the state’s growing deficit.

The agency’s handling of the troubled state-run mental hospital, Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, has also come under scrutiny.

Perkins’ Acting CEO Dwain Shaw resigned last month at the end of an independent evaluation of the psychiatric facility’s leadership, which followed the departure of its former leader, Scott Moran, earlier in 2024. Moran was placed on leave and barred from entering state-run psychiatric hospitals after allegedly harassing Department of Health employees over the internet. His license to practice medicine in Maryland was later suspended.

In a December hearing in which she was questioned by state lawmakers, Herrera Scott said she’d been misled about problems at the facility by its leaders and other MDH officials, who were “not only not advising me well, but were misrepresenting the facts of what was happening in the facilities.”

Under the acting leader, however, problems related to staffing declines, working conditions and a backlog of incarcerated patients continued.

A federal lawsuit filed by a disabilities rights group last month claimed Herrera Scott and the health department were violating state law and the U.S. and Maryland constitutions by keeping mentally ill people accused of crimes in jail rather than admitting them to psychiatric hospitals. Another federal lawsuit filed last year claimed the department failed to regularly inspect nursing facilities and investigate complaints.

Seshamani will be stepping into the agency as it looks to improve those facilities and as it faces immediate concerns from lawmakers and disability advocates over a $200 million cut to the Developmental Disabilities Administration in the next fiscal year.

That reduction was among $2 billion in cuts included in Gov. Wes Moore’s budget proposal last month, which seeks to fill a nearly $3 billion budget hole. Hundreds of advocates rallied against that move earlier this week, and Democratic lawmakers who are amending Moore’s proposal through the end of the legislative session in early April have said they make adjustments.

The Maryland Developmental Disabilities Coalition, which is made up of multiple advocacy groups, said in a statement Thursday that the cuts have “created an unprecedented challenge” for more than 18,000 Marylanders with developmental disabilities who rely on services. Its members look forward to working with Seshamani on the budget challenges, the statement read.

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