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Jim Malatras, the chancellor of the State University of New York system and a former senior aide to New York governor Andrew Cuomo, has been tied to several scandals rocking the Democratic governor’s administration in recent weeks.
In July, Malatras fiercely defended a report by the New York State Department of Health that effectively absolved a Cuomo administration policy from responsibility for a rise in COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes, ProPublica reported.
The report stated that infected nursing home employees were the primary driver of COVID-19 spread in the homes, not a Cuomo administration policy that transferred thousands of potentially contagious patients from hospitals to the nursing homes. Malatras told ProPublica last summer that the report was developed by health experts and that it should silence the governor’s critics.
Recent reporting by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal indicated that Cuomo’s administration removed from the report thousands of nursing home resident deaths that were believed to be caused by COVID-19 because the residents were moved to hospitals before they died.
A Cuomo lawyer has said the deaths in question had been omitted because the state was trying to ensure its count was accurate and that the ultimate decision to remove the hospital deaths was made by "the Chamber." ProPublica was unable to clarify what the lawyer meant. But the governor's office has in the past been called the executive chamber in New York.
The administration released the additional numbers in question last month, which brought total nursing home COVID-19 deaths from 8,000 to more than 12,000.
Malatras declined new comment when contacted by ProPublica. He pointed the investigative outlet to comments he made March 5, indicating his role in the report had been "to help review feedback on the scientific language in that public report to make it more accessible for a general audience" and that he "included the fatalities data provided by the New York State Department of Health which I did not alter and change."
Malatras was Cuomo's chief of operations from 2014 to 2017, then rejoined the administration during the pandemic. ProPublica called him one of the governor's three or four closest advisers on the state's pandemic response.
Merryl Tisch, chair of the SUNY Board of Trustees, did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment on Malatras’s support of the report. Cesar Perales, vice chair of the board, would not comment.
Malatras also drew fire from a former colleague earlier this month who alleged he attempted to defame her online. Two years ago, Lindsay Boylan, a former Cuomo aide, posted online about toxic work conditions in Cuomo’s office, The New York Post reported. Malatras allegedly responded to Boylan’s comments in a tweet defending Cuomo’s office, though he did not mention Boylan by name in the tweet.
“I saw someone Twitterbombing about family life on the 2nd Floor to get some attention for unrelated political purposes,” Malatras wrote. “That’s their prerogative. Is working in the chamber tough? You bet. Long hours? Yes. It should be. But my son was often a welcomed part of it so I could serve.”
The SUNY Board of Trustees appointed Malatras as chancellor in August without a national search. Critics of Malatras’s appointment worried at the time about his ties to the Cuomo administration and the possibility of expanding political influence over the state university system.
