Good afternoon and welcome to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors Personnel Administration and Legislation.

Committee meeting of Monday, October the 6th, 2025.

May I have a roll call, please?

Supervisor Fortinetal Bass.

Present.

Supervisor Town.

Present.

Thank you.

And let's move to the federal legislation update from CJ Lake.

Good afternoon.

To kick us off on the schedule, the Senate was in session last week before briefly adjourning on Thursday for the Yom Kippur holiday.

And then they returned on Friday to close out the week and try to vote on the CR, which failed.

And then they proceeded on passing a procedural motion to open up debate on a on-block of 108 executive branch nominees.

The Senate is continuing that work this afternoon.

They have a vote at 5:30 initially on the continuing resolution, which we expect will fail, and then also to close debate on the 108 on-block nominee package.

On the other side of the Hill, the House remains out of session until Tuesday, October 14th.

Speaker Johnson has indicated that members would call back to Washington ahead of the October 14th deadline within 48 hours of notice if and when they are able to achieve a deal or to pass the continuing resolution that was passed by the House in the Senate.

However, if the Senate does not pass the Clean CR, the House will remain out of session.

We are currently in day six of the federal government shutdown.

The debate will continue this week between the Republican Clean CR and the Democrats version, which would extend the ACA tax credits.

Last week, Senators Fetterman, Cortez Masto, Angus King joined Republicans in supporting the House's stopgap measure bill, but it still failed to secure ultimate passage as it stands now.

It still requires 60 votes to pass a bill through the upper chamber.

The Senate is again scheduled to vote tonight, and we expect that again to fail.

The White House has weighed in on the shutdown by canceling billions of dollars in federal funding for energy infrastructure projects in blue states and signaling that it will continue to move forward with mass layoffs of federal workers.

So we are currently waiting for another round of reductions in force or RIFs that could come at any day.

And we do anticipate that those rifts will be targeted primarily in states represented by Democrats in the Senate, very similar to the grants cancellations that took place last week from the Department of Energy, of which California was significantly hit.

There were 79 grant projects that were previously awarded to the state of California that were terminated last week because of the shutdown.

The administration has indicated that without a funding agreement in place, certain services and programs will become increasingly strained, potentially impacting taxpayers nationwide.

The WIC program in particular is the one that is on the top of many people's minds, which could run out of contingency funds in about two weeks.

The WIC program, unlike many other uh welfare programs, is a discretionary program.

And the contingency fund has only about 150 million dollars.

Um typically it's appropriated about $8 billion a year.

So the 150 million dollars to go nationwide does not stretch very far.

Um additional uh in addition to uh the WIC program, TANF and the Title 4B program will be unable to issue first quarter payments because authoration authorization for the program expired on September 30th, which failed uh in the continuing resolution to be extended and would need to be reauthorized by the next funding pill in order for HHS to issue those payments.

Um, similar story with the disproportionate share hospital program that also failed to delay the dish cuts that were originally implemented by the Affordable Care Act, but has since been delayed since the bill's passage uh for many many years by Congress.

Those uh typically send payments out on a quarterly basis, so it probably won't affect um hospitals that rely on dish payments, but that is one of many of the authorizations that fail to get passed, and we'll uh likely see some sort of interruption.

Um, but it's always possible for Congress to retroactively cancel those.

Um, the SNAP program uh will be able to operate at least through the end of October of this year in 2019, uh, at the conclusion of the last 34-day shutdown, Congress passed a bill that uh significantly expanded the carryover and contingency funds for the SNAP program because it was um at risk of expending last time.

Um in addition to the ongoing debate that's going on that's uh happening with the continuing resolution behind the scenes.

Uh there has been significant conversation on a uh Senate and House minibus.

Um, this is when the uh appropriations committee packages together individual appropriations bills and pass them as a single package.

Um, in this case, uh Senate and House appropriators from both the Democratic and the Republican parties have been working on a package to pass the MILCON VA AG, FDA, and LEGE branch bills.

They're nearly done, or they're just putting finishing touches on a final deal.

And today, in a conversation between Speaker Mike Johnson and the Senate appropriations ranking member Patty Murray, um, Speaker Johnson indicated that if the Senate were to pass this three bill minibus that Speaker Johnson would put it on the floor to be passed, most likely in a strong bipartisan vote.

Um, in addition to the MILCON VA, Ag FDA and LEGE branch bills, there's also conversation about potentially a second minibus that would package the uh labor HHS bill, the defense appropriations bill, and the transportation housing and urban development bill.

Now, this would be a full year appropriation, so it would be no longer subject to the continuing resolution like we're under now.

Um, it would also allow for many of the changes in discretionary funding levels that were agreed to on a bipartisan basis to become law rather than a simple extension of FY24 funding, which is what we're currently well, we were experiencing until September 30th as a of this year.

But uh I'll stop there and open the floor for any questions that you may have.

Thank you very much for that update.

Um Supervisor Fortunatabas questions, comments?

Uh thank you.

Um that was a very helpful update.

I am interested in hearing um any more information that we may have regarding layoffs that might occur during the shutdown.

If if there's additional information that we have.

In terms of where we're at right now, there isn't any additional information.

Um, when they do these kind of layoffs, they will send an email to those affected individuals that they have indeed been riffed or they've been part of the reduction in force, and as it stands right now, this meeting, they haven't issued additional RIFs for any of the agencies that would or could be affected.

Um, though I think if the shutdown continues further, we'll continue to see or we might start seeing additional rifts across the agencies.

And when that does happen, we'll be sure to flag it for you all.

Okay, thank you.

And then I do want to hear a little bit more about at what point the county and our services might be impacted, and so uh maybe this is just a note for our future work sessions.