Amy or Emily, can you sing if he can hear us?

We can hear you now.

We can hear you now.

Thank you.

Start over.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors Personnel Administration and Legislation Committee meeting for Monday, February the second, 2026.

May I have a roll call, please.

Thank you.

Um can you go over instructions for online participation and in-person participation?

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Thank you very much.

Let's start with the federal legislation update.

Go ahead, I'm sorry.

We are in a partial government shutdown, and I think it's about 80% of the federal government.

I know on our PAL call last Monday, we kind of we we thought that this could be a possibility.

Um I will say last week, Senate Democrats and the White House did reach a deal.

Um and basically when we were talking with you last Monday, we were talking about the overall FY26 minibus that included Homeland Security appropriations.

And of course, um Democrats wanted to pull out Homeland Security because of the events in Minneapolis.

And so they were successful in doing that.

And so ultimately, last Friday night, the Senate pretty overwhelmingly passed kind of the amended version of what the House had passed the week before, with all of the other appropriations bills to include labor HHS education, transportation HUD, defense, um, a lot of the really big ones.

Uh, they kept those together and basically pulled out the homeland bill and instead passed a continuing resolution for homeland in order to give them more time to negotiate um the homeland bill.

So that package went over to the House on Friday.

Uh the House Rules Committee meets today.

Uh they started meeting at four o'clock.

Um, and they will uh the plan is for to pass a rule out um for the bill.

And so the House in a perfect world would take up the amended package tomorrow.

Um, I think, best case, if they are able to get all the votes they need, um, they could pass that amended version and the partial shutdown would be lifted um, you know, as soon as tomorrow evening.

Uh, there is concern because the speaker at this point has a one vote uh margin to play with, and um, so he needs all of his folks in line.

And Democrats have said they will not help on the rule vote tomorrow.

So that is currently um the state of play.

Again, because the shutdown started Friday night, there are very minimal effects at this point.

And so if the government is to be up and running tomorrow, no one will really feel it.

Um, again, if it goes longer, then again, we will start to feel impacts.

And I know we talked about that a good bit last week, but that's kind of the current state of play.

John, I'm not sure if you want to throw in anything else to what the House may or may not do.

Yeah, the only other thing that I would mention is that um with the approval or pending approval of the Homeland CR, that uh extends funding for the Department of Department of Homeland Security for two weeks through February 11th.

That puts us right before the President's Day recess where they'll have a three-day weekend.

Um, and I believe they'll be out of session that week as well.

Um, so this puts a little bit of pressure for the White House and Senate Republicans to come up, or Senate Democrats rather, to come up with some sort of compromise proposal that they could include in the homeland bill to lower some of the temperature on immigration enforcement.

Um the difficulty is the proposals that Democrats want to see Republicans and the White House would want to do not through statutory language, which would be included in a probes bill, but through executive action, which has no um, you know, they would have to use existing authorities that has already been provided through law um through executive action.

Um Senator Graham from uh South Carolina has indicated his in exchange for his vote, he is pushing for a prohibition of federal funding on sanctuary cities and states that support sanctuary cities.

So I think California being front of mind.

Um that of course would never fly um in the Senate, which would require 60 votes on that sort of approval.

Um, but the horse trading on potential language to be included in the homeland approbes bill uh is very very much a live issue.

Um, this is all to say that despite the fact that Homeland Security will likely be in a continuing resolution, it does nothing for the 170 million dollars um provided to immigration enforcement through the one big beautiful bill act last year.

Of course, this was split mainly between IC and CBP, um, which is not part of the uh annual appropriations process.

So that's the current state of play with the approbes package.

Again, you know, the fact that uh Senate Dems were able to reach a deal with the White House last week shows kind of that they did have the upper hand and were able to pull out the Homeland Security Bill for further negotiation.

We just need to see how this plays out in the House tonight and then tomorrow.

And then the only other thing, and I know we've been talking about it since December and prior to that because of the first shutdown, but um, you know, there really hasn't been much in terms of uh Senate negotiations to revive the advanced of the enhanced affordable care act premium tax credits.

Uh, you know, Republican negotiators have said that uh they are approaching a decision point, um, and that they're preparing what could be described as a best and final offer following weeks of bipartisan discussions, but I don't think we're as far along as we had hoped uh that they would have been.

And I know when you first asked us how long we thought this would go, we were hoping that they could wrap it up in January.

So I just wanted to make that um that note.

Uh, but really the big focus this week will be of course on um the government funding talks.