Legislative Bulletin: State Budget Remains Delayed as Policy Issues Stall Progress

April 11, 2025

Need to Know: Top State & Federal Budget Advocacy Resources

There is a lot of activity right now at the State and Federal level that will affect the funding available for long-term care and aging services providers in New York. This edition of Legislative Bulletin explains some of the state and Federal context influencing our advocacy focus, and we encourage you to read about that background.

However, to keep things as simple as possible, below is a simple list of the most salient advocacy actions and resources we ask members to implement as we advocate to protect and increase the funding available for our membership. Your advocacy is critical, and we thank you for all your efforts!

1. Social Media Toolkit – Take your advocacy to social media and tag elected officials!
2. State Digital Budget Advocacy Letters – Keep up the pressure on State Legislators and the Governor!
3. State Budget Issue Briefs – All Service Lines – To inform phone calls to State Legislators
4. LeadingAge National Action Center – Advocate Federally to protect tax exempt bonds, Medicaid and other funding!
5. National Issue Briefs: All Service Lines – To inform conversations and advocacy with members of Congress
6. Contribute to LeadingAge NY PAC Today! – Support our relationship building with elected officials

 

State Budget Remains Delayed as Policy Issues Stall Progress; Member Action Needed!

New York State’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2025-26 Budget is now more than a week overdue, with the Legislature passing a fourth budget extender yesterday to keep government operations funded at FY 2024-25 levels through April 15. State legislators are expected to return to Albany on Tuesday to resume budget work and are likely to pass another budget extension as negotiations continue to move at a slow pace. Policy issues remain the reason for the delayed budget.

Legislators had been scheduled to be on their spring recess for the coming two weeks, however, with an out-standing state budget and subsequent canceled vacations, many legislators are likely to continue their budget and legislative work from district offices.

As negotiations drag on, and Federal actions that impact state funding evolve, uncertainty grows. LeadingAge New York is urging lawmakers to keep long-term care and aging services at the forefront of state budget discussions. But we need our members’ help to keep our budget requests top-of-mind!

ACTION NEEDED: Members are strongly encouraged to call and visit State legislators in their district offices over the next two weeks! Members can find state legislators’ contact information and district office locations here. Use these state budget issue briefs, including our new pieces on nursing home capital cuts and closures, to inform your phone calls and conversations with offices. Please feel free to reach out to Sarah Daly at sdaly@leadingageny.org if you would like to discuss messaging and focus of meetings with state legislators.  

LeadingAge NY will continue to closely monitor state budget developments, and advocate for the funding and reforms that reflect the real needs of New York’s older adults and the mission-driven providers who care for them.

 

Tax Exempt Bonds and Federal Medicaid Funding are at Risk!

You may have heard that Congress is developing a multi-trillion dollar package of policies that will impact federal spending, and they plan to determine and implement these policies through the budget reconciliation process. We provide more background on this process in our national lobby day recap below, but for now, we want to highlight two concerning proposed measures:

1. Elimination of Tax-Exempt Municipal Bonds: Congress is considering the elimination of tax exemption for interest earned on municipal bonds as a way to help pay for the cost of the budget package. LeadingAge’s nonprofit and mission-driven members across the care continuum rely on tax-exempt bond financing for many purposes, including expanding existing senior living campuses to enhance offerings and serve more residents, modernizing and renovating existing buildings, refinancing of existing debt, and developing new projects, including affordable housing. If you are concerned about the elimination of tax-exempt bonds, please click here to send a message to Congress! It only takes a few clicks!

 

2. Cuts/Changes to Medicaid: The budget resolution approved by the House of Representatives this week includes Federal spending reductions ranging from $1.5 – 2 trillion. This level of spending reduction would not be mathematically possible without significant cuts to Medicaid (approx. $500 – 880 billion). The methods used to attain this level of spending reduction are yet to be determined, but it is critical that we urge Congress to do right by older adults in the budget reconciliation process. Click here to send a message to Congress today!

Read more about Federal advocacy activities in our lobby day recap below.

 

We Can’t Stop Now! Please Send State Budget Letters and Amplify Social Media Messages

With New York State budget work ongoing, perhaps threatening to continue throughout April, we must keep advocating for top budget priorities to be included in the final budget for State Fiscal Year (SFY) 2025-26. It is crucial that we maintain the urgency and frequency of our message to ensure that our priorities do not fall off the negotiating table.

Please continue to push for the investments and restorations that long-term care providers need, and the funding that the people you serve deserve; use the tools below to continue to advocate with your state legislators and the governor now!

Please take a moment to click one or more of the below links to send an email to elected officials today! It only takes a few clicks!  

• Nursing Home Budget Letter – additional letters for board members, staff teams, family members, etc. are here.
• Adult Care Facilities/Assisted Living Budget Letter
• Home & Community-Based Services Budget Letter
• Managed Long-Term Care Budget Letter
•  Adult Day Health Care Budget Letter

Engage others in advocacy! Print and share advocacy flyers to increase our digital advocacy reach. Flyers can be printed and left in lobby areas or shared digitally with families and volunteers:

• Family Advocacy Flyer
• Constituent/Volunteer Advocacy Flyer
• ​​​​​​​Workforce Advocacy Flyer

Finally, social media advocacy is a great way to capture the attention of lawmakers and urge them to prioritize the care and service needs of older adults! LeadingAge NY has a state budget social media toolkit, which provides pre-written social media posts, along with graphics and videos created by members, residents and staff; and we are adding new graphics and messages to this toolkit throughout the remainder of state budget work. Using imagery and videos on social media to tell our story has proven effective in recent years, but we need our members to help us get our message out there in front of elected officials and the public!

The social media toolkit makes social media advocacy easy: simply download the image that you wish to use, copy the caption from the toolkit, and create a new post on your personal or professional social media accounts. Just be sure that your post “tags” the elected officials we are trying to focus our advocacy on. You will know the legislator has been tagged when their name lights up in blue.

Thank you to all our members who have advocated with us so far this year! We appreciate any energies you can dedicate toward advocacy during these delayed state budget negotiations. If we can maintain our advocacy momentum, our unified message will have a strong influence on the final state budget.  

 

2025 National Lobby Day Recap & Ongoing Federal Advocacy

On Wednesday, LeadingAge National hosted its annual coordinated Lobby Day on Capitol Hill. Representing New York, LeadingAge NY staff and a dedicated group of member advocates held 12 meetings with Senate and Congressional offices. Meetings spanned political parties and both houses of Congress, but our message was consistent: New York’s long-term care and aging services system cannot sustain any Federal cuts or changes to Medicaid or housing programs. Rather, our workforce needs support, and our funding should be increased as the number of aging New Yorkers who will need services continues to grow.

Our team of advocates shed light on how the Federal changes being considered would uniquely affect New York’s already challenged LTC sector and emphasized the importance of protecting the funding streams that support older adults, medically vulnerable children and the providers who care for them.

This year’s national lobby day couldn’t have been timelier. The morning after our lobby effort, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a new budget resolution calling for $1.5 trillion in federal spending cuts. While the Senate’s proposal calls for significantly smaller cuts, just $4 billion, the budget reconciliation process will be the next step in Federal funding decisions and it threatens to include massive cuts to Medicaid, housing programs, and other critical funding such as tax-exempt bonds which support long-term care projects and aging services.

The Federal budget reconciliation process is expected to heat up over the coming months and could stretch into late fall or even December. LeadingAge members and stakeholders must continue to advocate through-out the process if we wish to prevent significant cuts to our programs.

Members are encouraged to contact congressional offices using digital advocacy letters available in the LeadingAge National Action Center. In addition, if you were not able to join us in D.C. this week, you will have an opportunity to advocate in the district with your member of Congress during the Congressional Recess beginning next week, April 14 – April 25. Members interested in connecting with Congressional Offices should refer to LeadingAge National Lobby Day materials to use as handouts and to inform your conversations.

A big thank you to our New York providers and members of Congress who participated in meetings this week!  This is just the beginning of a critical Federal advocacy effort, and we thank you for lending your time and energy to the issues impacting New York’s older adults and medically vulnerable children.

 

Contact: Sarah Daly; 518.867.8845; sdaly@leadingageny.org