Update from Washington, D.C.
House Approves Short-Term Funding Measure; Top Appropriators Agree on Broad Framework for Year-end Spending Deal; House Approves Cannabis Banking Legislation; HUD Releases 2021 Homeless Assessment Report
House Approves Short-Term Funding Measure; Top Appropriators Agree on Broad Framework for Year-end Spending Deal
On February 8, House lawmakers voted 272 to 162 to advance a stopgap spending measure (H.R. 6617) that would extend government funding beyond the February 18 expiration of the latest Continuing Resolution (CR). It should be noted that in the absence of a full-year appropriation, every federal agency has essentially been running on autopilot since the fiscal year began on October 1, 2021.
Pursuant to H.R. 6617, federal programs would continue at current levels through March 11 with just a few exceptions, including an additional $1.6 billion for the Navy’s Columbia-class nuclear submarine, $350 million to address drinking water contamination at the military’s Red Hill fuel storage facility in Hawaii, and additional cybersecurity funds for the Department of the Interior. The bill also continues a temporary designation of fentanyl as a controlled substance. A short summary of the legislation can be accessed here.
The Senate is expected to clear the measure next week. Once approved and signed into law, H.R. 6617 will give congressional leaders an additional three weeks to finish negotiating a year-end spending package. While partisan disagreements regarding topline spending levels for domestic and defense programs have stalled talks between key lawmakers, leaders from both parties recently announced that they have agreed to a broad framework for a year-end spending deal. Although no specifics have been made available, this is a significant step toward finalizing fiscal year 2022 funding levels.
House Approves Cannabis Banking Legislation
Last week, the House passed a bill – the America COMPETES Act (H.R. 4521) – aimed at increasing U.S. economic competitiveness with China. During floor consideration, the lower chamber approved an amendment that would help state-legal cannabis and ancillary businesses gain improved access to financial services.
Specifically, the provision – which is modeled after the SAFE Banking Act (HR 1996; S 910) – would exempt depository institutions and their employees from federal prosecution or investigation solely for providing banking services to a state-legal cannabis-related business. Last week’s vote marks the sixth time that the chamber has approved the SAFE Banking Act. The measure will now be negotiated with a Senate-passed version (S. 1260), which advanced out of the chamber last summer. It should be noted that a similar amendment was added to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) during House consideration last year, but the language was stripped from the final bill following bicameral negotiations.
HUD Releases 2021 Homeless Assessment Report
On February 4, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released its 2021 Annual Homeless Assessment Report Part 1 to Congress (Part 1 provides Point-in-Time estimates, offering a snapshot of homelessness on a single night). HUD’s most recent estimates show that more than 326,000 people experienced sheltered homelessness in the United States on a single night in 2021, a decrease of eight percent, from 2020.
Other key metric s in the report, include:
- the number of sheltered people in families with children declined considerably between 2020 and 2021, while the number of sheltered individuals remained relatively flat.
- Between 2020 and 2021, the number of veterans experiencing sheltered homelessness decreased by 10 percent.
- On a single night in 2021, 15,763 people under the age of 25 experienced sheltered homelessness on their own as “unaccompanied youth.”
- The number of sheltered individuals with chronic patterns of homelessness increased by 20 percent between 2020 and 2021.
It should be noted that HUD waived the requirement for communities to conduct the count of unsheltered homelessness in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the report is only able to provide national estimates on sheltered homelessness (though does include some individual findings on unsheltered homelessness from the communities that conducted such counts). Additional information on the report, including key findings, is available here.