The Minnesota Department of Health has delayed layoffs of as many as 170 workers after discovering errors in job cuts prompted by the sudden loss of more than $220 million in federal grants.
Closer inspection found some workers who received layoff notices were funded by other federal grants and revenue sources, meaning the department wouldn’t necessarily fix its budget deficit by eliminating them.
“We knew that, due to the stop work order and abrupt termination of funds, there was a risk for mistakes which we would need to correct after the initial notices were sent,” assistant Commissioner Mel Gresczyk said Monday in an internal memo obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune. “Regrettably, this was the case, and there were people on the original list who should not have been.”
Gresczyk apologized to staff for the disruption, which occurred after President Donald Trump’s administration eliminated $11 billion in federal grants nationwide, arguing that they were earmarked to reduce COVID-19 and were no longer necessary because the pandemic public health emergency is over.
All layoff notices issued before next Monday will be rescinded and new ones will be issued on that date. Workers with seniority options will then have time to decide whether to take other jobs in the department and bump junior workers. The layoffs will take effect May 13.
Many of the layoffs were in the infectious disease section that responds to outbreaks. The cuts included epidemiologists and student workers from the University of Minnesota who made up the state’s famed Team Diarrhea, which gained a national reputation in recent years for the speed at which it uncovered the causes of foodborne disease outbreaks.
The state also had to shelve technological upgrades, including the planned use of artificial intelligence systems to scan medical records and data to identify infectious disease outbreaks earlier on.
The Minnesota Association of Professional Employees (MAPE) union represents many of the workers who had received initial layoff notices, and had called for the delay because of concerns that mistakes were made. Some laid-off workers in the immunization section of the department weren’t funded at all by the grants that were cut, union officials said.
