Meals on Wheels, Child Welfare: Key HHS Staff in SF ‘Woke Up and Our Jobs Were Gone’

Sara Minnich woke up Tuesday to an email she’d been dreading for weeks.

She was laid off from her job at the Health Resources and Services Administration — one of the federal agencies whose San Francisco staff was gutted as part of wide-ranging cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services’ workforce.

“We woke up one day and our jobs were gone,” she told KQED.

Minnich and hundreds of other HHS workers in the San Francisco regional office — which connects California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii, six U.S. territories and more than 100 tribes to federal health resources — were shut out of their government emails, computers and offices just hours after getting the message around 2:30 a.m.

The layoffs and closure of the office came less than a week after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that HHS would reduce its staff by about 25% and shutter at least five of its 10 regional offices in the name of “governmental efficiency.” He said about 10,000 roles would be eliminated, on top of another 10,000 employees who had agreed to leave through early retirement and other means.

Three former employees in San Francisco’s office who lost their jobs spoke to KQED about what they did for the department and the holes their terminations will leave behind.

Historical knowledge thrown out the window

The email was an impersonal form message: Minnich would be placed on 60 days of administrative leave before losing her job entirely. After she opened it, she quickly fired off a few emails to contacts in the department’s Denver office, one of the five she heard would remain open.

Minnich said she didn’t have time to hand off all of her work, but one of the documents she sent was vital: a 4,000-person contact list that included leads at primary care associations, employees in the region’s state offices for rural health, and organizations like the California Growers Association.

Minnich described her role as two-pronged: helping people connect with HRSA grant money and programs and making the programs work better for their needs.

When the COVID-19 vaccine was rolled out in 2021, HRSA worked with the California Growers Association to vaccinate migrant farmworkers. It also regularly hosts grant workshops with community-based health centers that don’t have the bandwidth to hire an expert, and it connects primary care associations and clinics in rural areas with targeted health initiatives like the Rural Communities Opioid Response Program and another for all-inclusive elder care.

“We are like ambassadors for the agency and liaisons between the general public, between HRSA grantees, [and] between health centers,” Minnich said.

She also did public health surveillance and collected feedback about the efficiency of some of the federal HRSA initiatives.

This meant hearing: “‘Here’s the way that we feel like us in rural areas are being left out,’ or ‘Here’s a gap in policy where it doesn’t take into account these specific circumstances,’” she said. “We could relay those messages back to our leadership and to the different bureaus and offices that were in charge of coming out with the funding opportunities and with the policies surrounding these grants.”

In the San Francisco office’s region, this work was especially important.

“When working with these Pacific Island jurisdictions and tribes, there’s so much knowledge and just so much trust that needs to be built before there’s any sort of successful partnership there,” Minnich said. “The amount of historical knowledge and experience and relationships that have sometimes taken decades to build … it feels like it’s all just being thrown out the window.”

‘We are the connective tissue’

Fay Gordon was a regional administrator for the Administration for Community Living, an agency that ensures states and territories adhere to federal laws related to community health and services for older adults and people with disabilities. It coordinates Meals on Wheels, which serves more than 216 million meals a year, and funds senior centers.

In addition to oversight and data management, a big part of Gordon’s job was to be a point of contact for service providers and recipients and “the central voice for them within our headquarters in D.C.”

“We are the connective tissue,” Gordon said. “We are the direct line from these local providers, from the senior centers, from the transportation providers, from the people who are doing respite … back to the complexity of the federal bureaucracy. And now that line is lost and that voice is lost.”

The Administration for Community Living is being completely overhauled. According to Kennedy’s March 27 directive, its “critical programs” will be integrated into other HHS agencies, like the Administration for Children and Families and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Gordon said that not having dedicated staff for ACL programs worries her.

“I think it has to do with capacity and relationships,” she said.

One part of the job that’s often overlooked is the role regional ACL employees play in disaster response, which often disproportionately affects older adults, according to Gordon.

After the deadly wildfires that devastated Los Angeles this year, she said her knowledge of California’s unique assisted living system was imperative in helping facilities and connecting residents with resources.

“Most people who work at the national level don’t realize that California has a very unique system of assisted living,” she said. “I was able to step in and say, ‘We’ve got to check on these smaller residential facilities, see if these business owners are OK, see where their residents are, what their emergency plan was.’”

Gordon did similar work after a major typhoon in Guam in May 2023 and the fires in Maui that August, she said.

“I am extraordinarily concerned with what will happen when there is a major climate disaster, which, given the fact that we work in the Pacific Coast, as we have seen, is very likely to happen,” she told KQED. “What happens when there’s no leadership at the national level that understands the unique systems and programs for older adults in that state and in that locality?

“And who will be there to elevate those needs and make sure that they get the supplemental programs and the funding and the resources in a timely manner?”

Preventing waste and abuse

Around 55 of the 65 Administration for Children and Families workers based in San Francisco were also laid off, including regional administrator Pete Weldy.

“Our entire Head Start team, our entire childcare team, our child welfare team, our child support team, the people that oversee the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, our people who do work on low income heating energy assistance programs” were all affected, he told KQED.

One of the administration’s most well-known programs is Head Start, which provides early education, nutrition, health and other services for children from low-income families.

In California, these are run through various entities, including cities like Oakland and county offices of education. In Oakland, Head Start funds a preschool program, lends laptops, and trains educators to work with kids up to 5 years old.

Weldy said that ACF also funded San Francisco’s Larkin Street Youth Services and Huckleberry Youth Programs through its Runaway and Homeless Youth Program.

ACF’s job was to ensure the programs used funding correctly and provided imperative resources for low-income families and youth.

“Program officers are really the people who are supposed to be preventing waste, fraud and abuse, who are making sure the dollars are spent in the way that Congress intended them to be spent — those are the folks who were there, who were providing both technical assistance and oversight over taxpayer dollars,” he said. “That oversight is now gone.”

Weldy said the federal government was putting some “hurdles” in its payment management system, which would require grant recipients to get validation from an employee before using some of their funds.

“With so many reductions yesterday, it’s hard to say if those programs are going to be able to get the money as quickly as they normally would,” he said.

Weldy isn’t as worried about the states as he is the tribes and territories he worked with, though.

One of the U.S.’s largest tribes, the Navajo Nation, is within San Francisco’s region, he said. “You also have a bunch of really smaller tribes. You have landless urban tribes who are federally recognized. These are really complicated, delicate relationships that the federal government’s been trying to mend for a hundred years or more, and we were making really good progress,” he said.

“But I think you have to be here to do that kind of work.”

He said that there are also unique challenges that face the Pacific territories, like American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam, since they are “treated like a state but not funded like one.”

Knowing the community nonprofits and funding recipients in the many areas covered by the West Coast region is key to making sure the $12 billion that used to flow through the San Francisco office was spent and went to good use, Weldy said.

“The regional offices like the front lines of the federal government,” he said. “We’re here in San Francisco because we’re closer to all of our partners in the region. We’re in the same time zone. They can come and visit us; we go visit them.”

All three employees said they hadn’t been told how the department plans to redistribute their work — or whether any such plan exists. Some grant recipients might start working with people in farther regional branches, like Denver or HHS’s D.C. headquarters.

They also aren’t sure whether their long-established regional networks will be maintained at all. Many contacts have already been wiped from their records.