Good afternoon and welcome to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors Personnel Administration and Legislation Committee for Monday, December the 1st, 2025.

May I have a roll call, please?

Supervisor Fortunato Pass.

Presence.

Supervisor TAM.

Present.

We have a quorum.

Since we're using MS teams, do you want to go over the participation rules?

Public participation is allowed in person and online via Microsoft Teams.

For all participants, please state your name for the record prior to your comment.

If you wish to speak on a matter not on the agenda, please wait until supervisor and committee chair, Lena Tam calls for public input on non-agendized items.

Only matters within the committee's jurisdiction may be addressed.

To notify the clerk that you wish to speak, please listen closely to the following.

For in-person participants, please fill out a speaker card at the front of the room and hand it to the clerk.

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Thank you.

We will start with the federal legislation update from CJ Lake.

Thank you, Supervisor.

And I just want to make sure that Emily is also elevated to presenter on Teams because I think she's having some technical issues.

She's been made a presenter.

Thank you.

Perfect.

Well, I'm happy to go ahead and get started just the same.

Just in terms of the schedule, of course, the House and Senate are back in session this week following the Thanksgiving recess last week.

They will be in session for 13 days for the House over the next three weeks, and the Senate will be in session for 12 days over the next three weeks.

At least, first and foremost, will be the ongoing debate over the future of FY 2026 appropriations.

As we've stated in previous meetings, the Senate continues its discussion on the potential of a subsequent minibus package that could include defense, labor, age, transportation, HUD, CJS, potentially interior.

This could also include energy water and maybe this Senate foreign ops bill as well.

Energy water was released the day before Thanksgiving.

On that Tuesday, rather, this, of course, funds the Department of Energy and the Army Corps of Engineers.

Appropriators are evaluating what combination of bills can be packaged together to maintain progress towards full year funding package ahead of the January 30th deadline.

House leadership has indicated that they will wait for Senate action before moving on to their own packages.

And as we stated in previous weeks, the House is looking to pass a much smaller package than that of the Senate.

So this is just a call for objections for unanimous consent agreements on the Senate side.

The House doesn't do this.

And so far, they still have about four objections on the hotline for a minibus package and Senate Democrats have still not issued a hotline.

They're still waiting on Republicans to kind of get their house in order before they move on to a full year appropriations package.

In addition to the ongoing debate going on on the appropriations side, of course, uh Congress still has to deal with the potential uh expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits under the Affordable Care Act, which uh expire on December 31st.

The Senate is expected to hold a vote next week, though members have not reached a consensus on whether to pursue a clean extension or make targeted changes to the credits.

There are multiple proposals that are circulating in both chambers, and negotiations uh remain ongoing as lawmakers determine a path forward before the deadline.

Um, of course, for the copy uh complicating this path.

House leadership is not committed to holding a vote, even if the Senate does want to pass an extension, essentially leaving uh the Congress rudderless with the movement forward.

There could be a show vote, but um the possibility of an extension remains fairly low.

Um, additionally, in the Senate, the Senate Health Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday to discuss ways to make health care more affordable for individuals and families outside of the tax credit conversation.

Um the Senate Health Committee has jurisdiction over HHS and other health-related agencies, but of course does not have jurisdiction of the tax writing uh committee that falls under Senate finance.

Um we expect that Chair Cassidy will discuss his legislative proposal to provide cash transfers into health savings account or HSAs as a way for Americans to lower the health uh the cost of certain health expenses.

This would broadly fall out of the health insurance conversation and into other health related expenses such as medical devices.

Um this would be done in lieu of extending the Affordable Care Act's enhanced premium tax credits conversation, which of course provides subsidies to health insurance premiums.

Um, and additionally, the White House planned, I believe we discussed this last week, but it bears repeating because um there's been no meaningful updates, but the White House planned to release a framework to extend the tax credits for two years, but that plan was shelved last week after significant pushback from the Hill uh last Monday, and still the White House has not yet released a plan for Congress to take up uh a potential extension, um, significantly diminishing the likelihood of a breakthrough before the end of the year.

Um, and I will hand it over to Emily uh to finish out the remainder of our report.

Sure.

Um one thing I want to talk about is LIHEAP funding because I know we spent uh some time talking about LIHEAP a couple weeks ago.

Um, and HHS released about 3.6 billion uh on Friday to states and tribes.

This is according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.

Again, as we've talked about, states typically receive their allocations at the beginning of November.