Appropriations

Continuing Resolution (CR)

On February 18, 2022, the President signed the CR which will extend federal funding at the FY’21 level until March 11.

FY’22

House and Senate appropriators are continuing their negotiations on the omnibus package. Senator Leahy, Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee stated: “It will provide the biggest increase in non-defense programs in four years. Under this framework, we can direct new resources to improve health care in rural communities, expand the middle class, and protect our national security.” But it is still unclear if there is parity between defense and non-defense spending.  Negotiations will also have to make a decision to include a new round of COVID-19 aid in the package. The Biden administration is considering requesting $30 billion in new pandemic health care spending, mostly for new vaccines, oral antivirals, and monoclonal antibody treatments.  But Republicans have pushed back on new pandemic aid, saying the administration must first account for any previously appropriated money that remains unobligated. Senator Leahy said he would prefer to keep pandemic aid on a separate track from the bipartisan omnibus negotiations.

FY’23 Budget

The White House is expected to release the FY’23 budget shortly after the President’s State of the Union Address, which will take place on March 1, 2022.

Abortion

More than half of recent abortions in the US were carried out with abortion pills, a sign that medication abortion has increasingly become the most accessible and preferred method for terminating pregnancy. The report, issued by the Guttmacher Institute, found that in 2020, medication abortion — a two-pill method authorized in the US for pregnancies up to 10 weeks’ gestation — accounted for 54 percent of all abortions. The figure represents a substantial increase from the institute’s previous report, which found that the method accounted for 39 percent of abortions in 2017.

Condom Use

For the first time, U.S. regulators have officially authorized a condom to be used for anal sex, not just vaginal sex. The decision, announced by the FDA on February 23, has long been sought by sexual health experts, who said it could encourage more people who engage in anal sex to use condoms to protect themselves against H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted infections. The risk of sexually transmitted diseases is “significantly higher” during anal sex than vaginal sex, an FDA official stated. But until now there has not been enough data to show that condoms are safe and effective during anal sex.

Supreme Court Nomination

President Biden will nominate Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.  Jackson, 51, currently sits on DC’s federal appellate court. Jackson clerked for Justice Breyer and served as a federal public defender in Washington. She was also a commissioner on the US Sentencing Commission and served on the federal district court in DC, as an appointee of President Obama before Biden elevated her to the DC Circuit last year.

COVID-19

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Guidelines

In the next few days, the CDC is expected to loosen its guidelines for when and where Americans should wear masks to prevent the spread of the COVID-19, allowing most people to go without face coverings in public indoor spaces. The agency is expected to recommend that anyone living in areas with substantial or high transmission of the coronavirus, as defined by case counts, should wear masks in public indoor spaces like gyms, movie theaters, and full-capacity houses of worship. That means that people living in 95 percent of the counties in the US should continue wearing masks indoors. The guidance is expected to hinge on newly defined metrics to determine whether people in a particular geographical area are at high risk from the virus, and will place less emphasis on case counts and give more weight to hospitalizations as a key measure of risk.   The guidelines are likely to factor in the capacity of hospitals in a local area as an important indicator of the level of risk. With hospitalizations declining across the nation, that may allow the great majority of Americans to drop their masks.

Public Health Emergency (PHE) Extended

On February 22, 2022, the Biden administration announced that the national public health emergency declaration will be extended beyond March 1.  The extension will allow HHS to continue pandemic-related flexibilities in Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act coverage requirements, including waivers for telehealth services. Although some Republican lawmakers have pressured the administration to wind down emergency pandemic measures, health care providers have urged HHS to keep those measures in place and to give adequate public notice before allowing the PHE declaration to expire.