and legislation committee of April the 7th. May I have a roll call please? Supervisor Fortinado Bass. Present. Supervisor Tam. Present. Thank you. Let's start with the Federal Legislative Update. Good afternoon everyone. I'll go ahead and get us started. Both chambers are in session this week. This is the final week of the work period before Congress goes into recess, which is scheduled to begin on April 11th. They will then go into recess for a period of two weeks for the Easter slash Passover recess. The big ticket item for this week is house action on the budget resolution on early Saturday morning the Senate passed a compromise budget resolution that the House will try to pass this week before the start of the recess. The revised budget resolution will allow for $4 trillion extension of the tax cut and jobs act in 2017, which passed under the first Trump administration and had an additional $1.5 trillion in additional tax cuts, which it totals $5.3 trillion in total tax cuts. The Senate plan instructs committees that oversee the entitlement programs of Medicare and Medicaid to find at least $4 billion in cuts. This pales in comparison to the $2 trillion in spending cuts that were instructed by the House's resolution, which as you can imagine has created some significant friction between the House and the Senate Republicans. This $4 billion cut number is meant to serve as a floor to provide maximum flexibility to senators when determining how much spending to cut, rather than the House's approach, which sets a pretty firm ceiling, which offers a little bit less flexibility and requires Congress to make some pretty significant changes to the overall federal budget. The Senate budget plan would also increase the debt ceiling by up to $5 trillion, compared to the $4 trillion increase the debt ceiling that was included in the House plan that was passed in March. The Senate parliamentarian is also expected to decide if the Senate's rules will permit Congress to extend expiring tax provisions at no cost. This is the current policy baseline debate that has been coursing through DC for the past two weeks. If so, committees may maybe under less pressure to find a large budgetary saving number and also may be able to shrink the expected cuts to Medicaid or other social programs if Senate parliamentarian and ultimately upholds the current policy baseline as allowed under the rules for budget reconciliation. As I stated earlier, there's still widespread disagreement within the Republican conference about whether it will be possible to reach that ambitious $880 billion in savings. That was prescribed by the House Adopted Budget. This is under the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Medicaid program, but still Republicans continue to talk about other ways they can cut costs within the health safety net program, such as identifying waste, fraud and abuse. However, and I think we've spoken about this a couple of times in the past, it's highly unlikely that Congress will be able to find $880 billion in waste fraud and abuse within the Medicaid program without affecting state budgets or benefits and just as a reminder, as I think I say, this almost every week. Now the House and Senate need to adopt the same budget resolution before Republicans can officially begin their work on a legislative package that they want to advance to the filibuster scurrying reconciliation process. We do anticipate that the House will ultimately adopt this Senate budget resolution that was passed on Saturday night. But I will caveat that with saying things change at a moment's notice. Politics is a funny business where things can change on a dime and I could be totally wrong come Wednesday because the politics has shifted from under us. So Emily, I'll kick it over to you to see if there's any other insight you have on reconciliation as we kind of embark on this last final week before recess. Yeah, you know, I think that's right. I mean, and again, passing the budget resolution is supposed to be the easy part of reconciliation. As you can tell over the last few months, it hasn't been easy. I think John is right, you know, ultimately, you know, when President Trump has gotten involved when we thought the House Republican caucus was not united, he was able to unite them on appropriations and the CR, and then on the first budget resolution. So I think we feel like at the end of the day, they will likely come together. I think at this point if everyone is in attendance for the House, the Republicans can lose up to three votes on the budget resolution. And then again that is simply instructing the committees on the cuts that they need to find. So then the committees have the hard work to do. So that is kind of the current state of play as far as the budget resolution and reconciliation. Kind of switching gears to FY26 appropriations. House appropriations committee chairman Tom Cole released preliminary guidance and deadlines for the FY26 appropriations process last week. House subcommittees have deadlines throughout May to submit requests. So our members to submit requests to the committees. So that tells us that committee consideration of or drafting of text won't begin until June at best. So again, it's just delaying the process. We've also heard that, you know, President Trump could release a skinny budget later this month or into early May, and then we expect the full FY26 budget request to be sent to Congress at some point in May. And then, but again, as we've talked about, I know in Powell previously, because of all this, we are expecting a continuing resolution to get us into the new fiscal here, which starts October 1, especially if they're going to be focused on reconciliation for most of the summer. And then just a note on tariffs. I mean, as you all saw last week and what continues to happen, President Trump has doubled down on tariffs. We're all seeing what's happening in the news. I think what's interesting is congressional Republicans responses to the tariffs have broadly been muted. And leadership has instructed ranking file not to oppose the president's actions, but we have seen seven Senate Republicans signing on as co-sponsors of the Trade Review Act, which would reassert Congress's trade authority and let it weigh in on new tariffs. Those seven Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Lisa Morkowski of Alaska, Tom Tillis of North Carolina, Todd Young of Indiana, Mitch McConnell, Kentucky, and then Susan Collins of Maine. We don't expect that bill to go anywhere. It may pass this in it, but house leadership wouldn't allow the bill to come to the floor. We don't anticipate, but just the fact that this bill has been introduced, I think, is to set something. There are a couple hearings this week too that we will be paying attention to tomorrow. The House Financial Services Committee has a hearing on HUD. It's titled Decades of Disfunction, Restoring Accountability at HUD. So we'll be paying attention to that. Then the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Work and Welfare has a hearing titled government watchdog findings, temporary assistance for needy families in need of reform, better state accountability and fraud protection. So again, we will be monitoring those two hearings and we'll report on those. That's our report for this week. And happy to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you for the update. No matter how grim it is, suffrage of order notade Bass. Comments questions. Yes. Just one question. Thank you again for the update. I am curious following last week's consolidations and layoffs with so many federal employees. Is there anything this week in terms of how some of those services are moving forward and how some of that restructuring is happening? Go ahead, John. I guess I'll start with HHS because that one seems to be the most drastic. It's currently unclear how many of these services are, and I guess I'll add Department of Education as well. It's kind of unclear at this point how those services are going to be administered either at their new home or at all. There was a report today that the idea Act funding, which is a Department of Education program that provides funding for students with disabilities is now going to be handled under HHS. But the agency that would have administered this probably would have been ACF is also going under restructuring under the new agency within HHS. The LIHEAP program, which provides subsidies to low-income people for their utility bills. This is used for in California extensively during the summer for air conditioning purposes. It's also used extensively in the northern snow states for heating oil or propane or natural gas. Everyone has been fired from the LIHEAP office at HHS, so it's unclear how that funding is going to be going out. I think Emily touched on IMLS funding. They have not provided very many answers to the appropriations committees in Congress or to the public, so I'm not sure they have a solid plan on how exactly the funding is going out. I will note that the Senate Health Committee, Health Education Labor and Pensions, has invited RFK Jr. to testify before the committee on Thursday. However, he has not yet accepted that invitation, so the hearing has not technically been scheduled. As it stands now, there has been significant resistance in the part of the Trump administration to send cabinet officials to Congress to testify before the release of the budget, which as Emily stated earlier, is likely to happen in May. So there's a bit of a gap on oversight between Congress and the administration's ability to provide reasonable information and what they intend on doing with these funding streams during this massive reorganization push. I know that's not probably a satisfactory answer, but it's kind of just what we've all been dealing with as as we've been reaching out to offices to get information. It's been coming out and kind of drips and drabs and it really depends on who is there and which agency you're referring to or which program you're talking about. Thank you. Certainly HHS is very concerning, as well as the Department of Education. So I think it's something that we should just continue to monitor given the impacts here in the county and the services that will be provided. And I'll just say as a point of information, I am grateful that people over the weekend made their voices heard because all of this is in, it's not normal, it's incredibly potentially destructive to our well-being, our health and our safety.. So, yeah, we'll just continue on monitoring what's happening and doing the best that we can. Thank you. I echo some of the comments from my colleague. I visited a number of senior centers and some of the rallies over the weekend. The most concerning obviously to the county is the $880 billion savings that they're trying to get out of cutting Medicaid, which affects medical and then obviously with Medicare. But you talked about, you know, Trump being able to unify the Republican caucus even in your notes about the debt ceiling, but at the same time they're trying to get savings or they're trying to offset one with the other because clearly, is, I mean, in our area, it's not acceptable, but I'm sure in other parts of the country, it's also not acceptable because a lot of constituents in the Republican caucus depend on these services. And I think that that's kind of the wild card is the Medicaid cuts quite frankly. And so I don't think we've kind of, it's been tough to see how all of that plays out, particularly because there are some Republican states that would be really hard hit. We were talking about this earlier, I think, in our internal, a call, CJ late call earlier today. And John and I were just talking about the fact that there are three states that have the Medicaid expansion kind of written into their constitution. I'm going to draw a blank now, but Missouri and I think Oklahoma and I think South Dakota. And so, you know, cuts would be really, it would hit their states really hard in terms of their budgets. And so I think we saw that the last time when Republicans were trying to replace and repeal, and ultimately Obamacare, and ultimately they weren't able to do so because Republican governors were reaching out talking about what those impacts would be. So I think quite frankly, it's just hard to know kind of how going to go because you're right and there were some senators. There was one amendment on the Medicaid cuts over the weekend when they were taking up the Senate budget resolution where three Republicans voted with Democrats. Now, it ultimately, the amendment failed and I think those Republicans knew that they could vote with Democrats. Excuse me, and it wouldn't ultimately impact. But you saw Josh Hawley from Missouri, Susan Collins from Maine, and Lee Simmerkowski from Alaska, objecting to those cuts. So I think on the Senate side, it's more fragile. And so we're just, I'm not certain kind of where they will go to find those cuts. John, I see you've just unmuted. So please. No, there's also this interesting dynamic. Now that the Senate has already passed this budget resolution on Saturday, it's now up to the House to really confirm that they wanna go down this path with $880 billion in cuts within the Energy and Commerce Committee. The first time around when they agreed to this originally, there was a little bit of hope from several Republican members that they could vote yes, and then the Senate would amend it and then send it back to the House at a lower number, and they would throw their hands up and say, see, we can't do that $880 billion. That's ridiculous. It has no chance of passing the Senate. Well, now this is for real. If they go down this path and hit this $880 billion, they're going to have to have a very serious conversation with their leadership about whether or not they want to go down this path. It really sets them up to a precarious political situation where they're going to have to make the calculation based pretty much exactly on your comments. Do they really want to disadvantage their state and so many people in their district to execute this political project? That's going to come from their stakeholders, that's going to come from their states, that's going to come from their state legislatures, that's going to come from the people that they listen to. And they're also going to be facing a counter-vailing pressure from a public and leadership and the White House, who are going to push them incredibly hard to vote, to basically swallow what is agreed to within the majority of the Republican conference. So it's going to be a tough fight, I think, ahead of time. You know, reconciliation is a tricky little thing. But excuse me. And then, you know, we didn't answer your question about the cuts, like the revenue coming in and the debt limit you know it's it's two different issues they're basically saying we've got to pay to extend the tax cuts from 2017 we've got to find revenue and so or savings and so that's where you see kind of the potential for Medicaid cuts and other cuts. But then in addition to all of that, the debt ceiling needs to be raised. And right now that timing, it's always kind of a moving target. But right now it looks like maybe August, September I think. And so Republicans have made the calculus that they are going to include the debt ceiling, raising the debt ceiling in the budget reconciliation bill, kind of all or nothing, right? And again, in general, there have been, or historically, Republicans have not wanted to vote to increase the debt ceiling and have needed Democrats to kind of take it over the line. By including it in the budget, or in budget reconciliation, it's just kind of another item. And again, leadership and President Trump are saying it needs to be done. And so they're throwing it kind of into the mix. It's also putting pressure on the timing of when to get budget reconciliation done. If you need to raise the debt limit by the fall, then we can't wait till the end of the year to do budget reconciliation. So it's kind of another way to push that along. And also just note that they want to move the debt ceiling increase into reconciliation. So they pass it on a party line vote and they deny Democrats the opportunity to have any sort of leverage in the debt ceiling negotiation. So they are putting that pin back into the grenade. They're saying we're going to do this on our own. We're not going to give the opportunity for Democrats to demand anything in response for their debt ceiling vote. Those big ticket items, because there are three this year, right? There's the reconciliation bill. There's a debt ceiling vote, and then there's the CR slash FY26 appropriations by putting the debt ceiling vote into reconciliation. Now there's two. So they'll have to decide whether or not to keep the government open. Democrats are going to vote against a reconciliation bill. But the problem is with that there are a bunch of hardliners in their Republican conference that hate raising the debt ceiling have always voted against it. There are about 30 of them and those are the people that they have to convince tend to voting for the reconciliation bill but they're hopeful that the sweetener is going to be the bulk of the Trump legislative agenda to this nasty bill that they don't want to take on the debt ceiling. So there's a bit of internal or public and politics going on at the same time. Thank you for that insight. It looks like a very complicated machinations to try to leverage each of the caucuses. Are there any other questions or public comment on this item? No comment on item one. Thank you again. Let's go to the legislative update from the state. Good afternoon Amy Costa with, what full moon strategies with your state legislative update. I'm going to ductail on my federal colleagues and talk a little bit about the federal tariffs. Obviously, those are dominating the national news right now. However, there are some significant implications potentially to California. So budget watchers in particular are watching the stock market and the reverberations from the tariffs. Because of California's progressive revenue structure, the top 1% of earners in California drive almost 50% of the state's personal income tax and a big component of that is actually capital gains. I would note that during the previous two recessions in 2001 and 2008, the state experienced significant revenue declines and part driven by stock market implications because of the stock market losing value as well as having a long-term effect. Anything budget watchers and Sacramento are worried we might be entering into a similar phase here with the tariffs and the reverberations. Last week, several urban counties including ourselves were brought into a meeting with AT&T representatives. They are revisiting the carrier of last resort or cooler proposal that they brought forward last year. They mentioned that in a future version of the bill, they plan to include a community benefit. However, that language is not in print right now, but we will however continue to monitor that and report back to Powell on the progress of that language. Last week, the News and Administration missed a pretty significant deadline to begin implementation of Proposition 35. You will call that Proposition 35 was the initiative passed overwhelmingly by voters in November regarding the managed care organization tax. As part of the initiative, there was a committee that was to be formed and they had a hard time fully forming and appointing all the members of that committee. Recently, the Department of Health Care Services Director Michelle Bass said that in part the application to the feds was delayed primarily caused by this unfilled advisory committee appointments. Colleber legislators pushed back noting that they did have a forum and the committee could have met. However, they didn't make the deadline and at this point they have agendas and notice the first meeting of the committee to take place on April 14th. And we have a link in our notes for those that would like to listen and it is open to the public. We've also had a couple of moving pieces in the legislature with two special election updates. We had a special election through a place Vince Fong who moved on to the US House, Republican Stan Ellis I and was sworn in in March. Similarly, Janet Nguyen moved from the Senate over to the Orange County Board of Supervisors and a former legislative Tony Strickland has taken that seat and he was also sworn in on March 3rd. You may have also heard that Assemblymember Bill Asale resigned on April 1st. This was after being named by President Trump as a US Attorney for the Central District of California. So we're awaiting how that vacancy will be filled. We do have one Democrat who's already announced his candidacy. We have some more details on that in our power port as well.. Today we will be testifying on behalf of Alameda County for Assemblywoman Bonta's bill on illegal dumping and litter and with that happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you. Any questions or comments? I just have a couple. We had a presentation last week from the L.A.O.'s office and they were obviously very clear on some of the statutory deadlines that the state has to comply with in adopting the budget, but they talk specifically about the incoming revenues. And so we have on our request agenda for legislation positions, a budget request for Cal works, it's a one time of $245 million. And it's not just for Alameda County. It's basically for the whole budget process. And then similarly on the in-home supportive services administration, it hasn't been changed that methodology since 2017. And there needs to be some increase in allocation, particularly for people who are processing these applications at the county. Do you, in light of what you're hearing about, a budget, are you thinking there's room for that within the state's 200 and some odd billion dollar budget? Over 300 billion in counting. So I would say I think one time funding is always easier to come by in the state budget process of to the degree it's one time in nature that's going to be easier. I think we won't know with any certainty until the May revise comes out, which we will expect in mid May. I will say there are a couple of headwinds that make the revenue projections for the state difficult. We've talked about it previously one and set the delayed income tax returns in the Los Angeles area in a given the wildfires there. and that's, you know's a significant population base for this day. Secondly, as we saw last week, I think the stock market in particular could have some profound impacts on what the revenues are that they're projecting. So more come, and obviously, as my federal colleagues have pointed out, it's kind of a wild ride. So I don't know on the tariff side, things could level out between now and May. We just don't really know. I do think we're hearing some signals that people are perhaps going to be more cautious on the ongoing side of the ledger, given some of the censor and tea. Okay, and I know that the governor did ask for an exception for the terrorists from for California We are at the fourth or fifth largest economy. So how likely is that to be received? I defer to my colleagues that even though we call ourselves the nation state doesn't mean it's so And you know there are certain requirements that we have to meet as a state and those include you know the federal law regarding tariffs. So I appreciate his thought on it but I still think there's some mechanical issues with that. Are you waiting for comments from John or Emily? I think they probably would agree with me, you know, just because I- I- They should stay. As much as the governor thinks that he can start striking trade deals with foreign ministries, I think that the courts would look down on that significantly. It really reminded me of during the Obama administration where the governor of Arizona tried to set Arizona immigration policy because they're a border state and she declared a state of emergency in the state of Arizona. And then this caused this big uproar about who had jurisdiction over immigration policy and the Obama administration then reasserted its role and then they had this whole confab about who was responsible for the border. And that's kind of like what's going on here with the governor of California trying to assert his role as the fifth largest economy in the world and saying that we can set up our own trade policy. But you know, fact of the matter is, the president has jurisdiction of the goods of what comes in and not at the country. The states don't write those rules. So even if he does try to set up like a bilateral relationship with like the trade minister from Japan, there's no legal way for them to really do that, that won't, you know, because it doesn't speak for the United States. Okay. Thank you for that response. Are there any other questions or public comments on this item? No comments on item two. Okay. So we have a request from our social services agency to make a request for the state budget, for the CalWORKs single allocation funding of $245 million and a state budget request for in-home supportive services administrative rebase funding also from social service. Do we have concurrence on advancing that or support? Thank you, we do. Are there any comments or questions on this item? No comments on legislative items. Okay, are there any public comments on items not on today's agenda? I have no speakers for public comment. Okay. And will those participating online identify themselves if they're willing? I, Valerie Arkin from Supervisor Miley's office. Good afternoon. This is Hana Hamilton with Alameda County Social Services Agency. Hello, this is Leon Fernando with Alimita County Child Support Services. Good afternoon, Jessica Blakemore, Elimita County Health. Hi there, Mona Bargipson from Elima County Assessor's Office. Thank you. Thank you all for your participation, which we had better news to share with you. Meetings adjourned. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.