Minneapolis VA to resume hiring after exemptions from Trump hiring freeze announced

The Minneapolis Veterans Medical Center was preparing Thursday to renew job offers for clinical and hospital roles that it had rescinded two days earlier as part of a federal hiring freeze.

The Department of Veterans Affairs issued a statement Thursday clarifying that 39 categories of health care workers were exempt from the hiring freeze issued by President Donald Trump’s administration on its first day.

The statement came amid criticism of the sweeping hiring freeze by lawmakers such as U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn. She turned to social media Wednesday after hearing that the Minneapolis VA had suspended the hiring of key clinical workers.

“They seem to be backtracking,” she said in an interview Thursday, “but it just makes me so mad that they would issue this executive order with no real thought to what impact it has on veterans or the people that work in the VA hospitals.”

Minneapolis VA director Patrick Kelly notified his staff in an email Tuesday that it would need to rescind job offers to 18 people who wouldn’t be “onboarded” by Feb. 8 and rescind prospective job offers to another 65 people. The job cuts included clinicians charged with expanding medical care to underserved rural areas.

“This is not good news and I appreciate this will create staffing gaps,” Kelly said in the memo, which said that it was intended to provide transparency amid internal confusion over the hiring freeze. A copy of the memo was provided to the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Thursday’s clarification means the VA can resume some of these hires. Officials from the Minneapolis VA were unable Thursday to specify which or how many of the jobs would be restored.

Positions exempted from the freeze include doctors, nurses, physician assistants, pharmacists, respiratory therapists and psychologists.

The Trump administration announced the federal hiring freeze Monday as part of a broader effort “to reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition.”

While it exempted jobs that preserve veterans' benefits and public safety, the statement still left uncertainty until now over the fate of medical staffing within the VA.

Smith said she was in contact with leaders at the Minneapolis VA but that she would also be reaching out to leaders at veterans hospitals in St. Cloud, Fargo and Sioux Falls to make sure they had clarity over which workers they can still hire.

The president also ordered a temporary freeze on external communications by federal health agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The breadth of that freeze became clearer Thursday when the CDC didn’t publish a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which routinely updates the nation on emerging infectious diseases and health risks. The Associated Press obtained a memo indicating that the communications freeze would last through Feb. 1.

The disruption included updates and statistical data that the Minnesota Department of Health considers “crucial to our work of protecting and improving the health of all Minnesotans,” the department said in a statement. “We look forward to the return of regular communications from our federal partners on February 1.”

On his weekly podcast, the University of Minnesota’s Michael Osterholm said he hoped the blackout would be lifted in two weeks, after the new administration had a chance to review and understand its outgoing communication channels.

“If not, this puts us in serious jeopardy in responding as public health agencies to what we know will be the emerging crisis of the day of the week of the month,” said Osterholm, director of the U’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.