Oregon Health Authority director Sejal Hathi stepping down in August

The director of the Oregon Health Authority, Dr. Sejal Hathi, is stepping down.

The governor’s office announced Hathi’s resignation, effective Aug. 1, in an email to OHA employees on Thursday morning. The decision was Hathi’s, according to that email, which included a personal note from Hathi.

“There is never an easy time for a transition like this,” Hathi wrote, “and it is time for me to focus on my family, my health and personal priorities, and the next chapter of my life and service.”

She did not offer more details or say what she plans to do next. In an op-ed for the New York Times in May, she described a difficult recovery from the birth of her first child a year ago.

Hathi’s departure is a surprise and comes as OHA is preparing for a painful budget cycle that will require a $421 million cut to the Oregon Health Plan, a nearly 5% cut to the state medicaid program that is the heart of the agency’s mission.

Her successor also inherits a complex set of challenges overseeing the Oregon State Hospital, a state-run psychiatric facility that primarily serves people awaiting trial or otherwise involved with the criminal justice system.

Gov. Tina Kotek selected Hathi after a national search in 2023. Prior to her tenure at OHA, Hathi served for two years as the White House’s senior policy adviser for public health and had been a working physician during the Covid-19 pandemic. Hathi has held a part-time faculty position at Stanford during her time leading OHA.

Hathi was the first person recruited from outside of Oregon to lead the health authority.

The prior director of OHA had left after just months in the job. That sudden departure followed the prior OHA director resigning days after Kotek took office, after the governor had signaled on the campaign trail that she would fire him.

Hathi had promised stability.

“I am here to stay,” she said at the time. “Hopefully for two terms, if the team, the governor, the people of Oregon will have me.”

The state health authority employs nearly 6,000 people and has the largest budget of any state agency, $42 billion dollars in the current biennium.

Hathi’s departure comes at a particularly challenging time for the OHA and Kotek. After more than a decade of expanding Medicaid to cover a greater share of Oregonians, the state is caught between rising costs for the program and historic cuts to federal funding for it congressional republicans passed last year.

That led to a $421 million state funding gap for the Oregon health plan in the next budget cycle, 2027-2029.

During Hathi’s tenure, the state has made some progress resolving legal and regulatory issues at the Oregon State Hospital.

For the first time in years, the state is in compliance with a court order that requires the hospital to maximize the efficiency of its treatment programs to serve more patients. But Hathi has also faced questions from The Oregonian/OregonLive over how much she knew about the excessive use of seclusion for patients at the facility during her tenure leading OHA, a practice that contributed to the death of at least one patient.

The governor has appointed Fariborz Pakseresht, a longtime state government veteran, to serve as interim director of OHA beginning July 6.

Pakseresht, the agency’s interim director, has spent more than three decades working for the state, including serving as the director of the Oregon Department of Human Services for almost a decade. He retired from that post in July of 2025.

His tenure overseeing one of the state’s largest state agencies was often marked by turmoil, especially within the child welfare department. While he was at the helm, the state was sued and settled a sweeping class-action lawsuit in which Oregon agreed to reduce the rate of mistreatment of kids in child welfare. A judge also appointed an independent person to oversee the child welfare system after Oregon seemed unable to improve the system while Pakseresht led the agency.

The governor continually stood by Pakseresht during his tenure. Before becoming director of the agency in 2017, he led the Oregon Youth Authority.

This story was originally published on July 2, 2026 by Oregon Public Broadcasting.