LeadingAge

On December 21, Congress passed legislation that included an Omnibus Spending Bill, which allocates funding for the 12 fiscal year 2021 appropriations bills. The spending package also contains a $900 billion emergency coronavirus relief package to protect the lives of the American people.  The approximately 6,000 page bill, The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (Omnibus and Coronavirus Relief Bill) directly or indirectly impacts most every part of the aging services continuum.

The bill, if passed and signed into law, would appropriate an additional $3 billion to the PRF, bringing the total to roughly $38 - 43 billion. There had been some previous discussions in Congress to target some of the new allocations for rural and Indian Health Service providers but these did not make it into the final bill after the appropriation was reduced to a much smaller number.

This article is a high level overview on the combination omnibus-coronavirus relief package that was passed by Congress on December 21, 2020. The approximately 5500 page bill, The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (Omnibus and Coronavirus Relief Bill) directly or indirectly impacts most every part of the aging services continuum. This package provides another, long-awaited round of coronavirus relief, funds the government through September 30, 2021, and includes a number of other priorities for aging services providers.

The agreed-upon but not quite signed-into-law $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief and FY21 omnibus spending bill includes the final fiscal year 2021 HUD spending bill. Overall, the bill provides a total of $49.6 billion for HUD, $561 million above the 2020 enacted level and $12.4 billion above the President’s budget request. Within it, Congress provides funding for new Section 202 housing, for new Service Coordinators, for a two-year extension of HUD’s IWISH demonstration, and a revival of an intergenerational housing set-aside within the Section 202 account.