- The Topline
Welcome to The Topline, a weekly roundup of the big numbers driving the Minnesota news cycle, as well as the smaller ones that you might have missed. This week: Massive cuts at the Minnesota Department of Health; the most diverse places in Minnesota; recovering ill-gotten gains from Feeding Our Future defendants; and county-level impacts of Trump’s NIH cuts.
MDH losing $226 million in federal funds
The Minnesota Department of Health announced last week that the Trump administration is unilaterally rescinding $226 million in federal grants related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This termination is effective immediately and impacts ongoing work and contracts,” Health Commissioner Brooke Cunningham said in a statement. “This action was sudden and unexpected.”
The cuts amount to about 25% of MDH’s current budget, according to KARE-11, and are likely to result in the layoffs of around 200 employees. The actions are part of a broader nationwide effort to eliminate $11 billion in spending by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Among the programs affected: COVID-19 testing and vaccination efforts; research to improve vaccine effectiveness and respond to future pandemics; and efforts to develop treatments for other types of virus with pandemic potential.
Minnesota recently scored poorly on a national ranking of health emergency preparedness.
Minnesota’s most (and least) diverse counties
Minnesota has become ever so slightly more diverse since 2020, according to Census data analyzed by the USA Facts team. But it’s close to the bottom tier of states on diversity.
If you were to select two Minnesota residents at random, there’s roughly a 40% chance that they won’t have the same race and ethnicity. The most diverse state is Hawaii, where there’s a 76% chance you’ll get two people of different races, while the least diverse state is Maine, where the odds of selecting different races is just 16%.
There’s lots of variation at the county level, too. Morrison County in central Minnesota is the least diverse in the state, with less than a 9% chance of drawing two people of differing ethnicities. You might expect urban core counties like Hennepin or Ramsey to have the most diversity but that’s not quite right: Mahnomen County in the northwest scores highest on the measure, with a 62% chance of selecting people with different ethnicities. That likely owes to the county’s high proportion of Indigenous residents.
Hennepin and Ramsey aren’t far behind, however.
Nationwide, the least diverse places are counties in Appalachia, while the most diverse tend to be located in Hawaii and Alaska.
Feds may only be able to recover $50 million from Feeding Our Future defendants
Federal prosecutors have seized about $75 million in assets from Feeding Our Future defendants so far, according to the Star Tribune. That’s just a fraction of the estimated $250 million in total diversions of money by the alleged fraudsters.
And the final tally of recovered funds is likely to be even smaller, as some of the seized assets are depreciating in value and will cost money to sell off. The final recovery might be as little as $50 million, prosecutors say.
Defendants funneled their ill-gotten gains into things like lavish trips, shopping and entertainment, prosecutors allege. Some money was squirreled away overseas.
In federal white collar crime cases, recovery rates of as little as 10% are often seen as commendable, giving the difficulties of clawing back money that may have been spent over many years.
The effect of NIH cuts in your county
A consortium of researchers at several universities have released county-level estimates of the total financial impact of cuts to National Institutes of Health grants announced by the Trump administration last month.
The estimates incorporate not just the lost grant dollars themselves, but also the spillover effects of the additional economic activity the NIH grants stimulate. Running the numbers that way shows that the cuts have impacts not just in the counties where the affected medical and scientific institutions are located, but also in surrounding communities that benefit from the economic activity generated by those research hubs.
No county in Minnesota is unaffected, according to the researchers’ estimates. Minnesota as a whole will see a $355 million decrease in economic activity, causing the loss of more than 1,400 jobs.
Hennepin and Olmsted counties, home to the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic respectively, account for more than $200 million of Minnesota’s losses.
Last updated 7:38 a.m., Mar. 31, 2025
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