As they talk trillions in Washington, D.C., a look at the much smaller line items that matter locally.

Sara Rubin here, thinking about money. More specifically, I am thinking about the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act (its official title) now being debated in the halls of Congress, which could extend and expand tax cuts and cut government spending in a variety of areas, perhaps most notably $700 billion from Medicaid, the nation’s indigent health insurance program. Even with reductions in spending, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act would add $2.3 trillion to the national debt over 10 years. 

These are big numbers, so big that I admittedly find them hard to relate to. Knowing that the Trump administration had a mission to slash federal spending, we undertook a project in March at the Weekly to establish a baseline, looking back at last year to see: How much federal funding flowed into Monterey County? 

We tallied a number in excess of $7.5 billion, including a range of federal grants and programs (such as support for agriculture, military contracts and federal support for K-12 schools). But we knew even upon publication that our list was incomplete. The U.S. Postal Service, for example, told us that to get budget information for Monterey County—think postal worker salaries, building and truck maintenance—we’d have to file a U.S. Freedom of Information Act request, which can take many months to fulfill. We decided to publish a partial, not-comprehensive list with some key line items included to give readers a general baseline.

The Monterey County Department of Social Services administers many programs that include federal funds, and similarly to answer our questions required that we submit a California Public Records Act request. We did, and the answers are back, so I wanted to provide a brief update. 

Some line items are small, but might matter significantly to an individual or a family. The County reports that $64,906 in federal funds were spent on the refugee and entrant assistance program last fiscal year; $317,255 on guardianship assistance; $1.7 million on foster care assistance; and $6.6 million on adoption assistance. These are direct benefits that flow directly to families. 

There is also Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a program you might think of simply as “welfare,” which last year paid over $9.8 million directly to Monterey County residents. 

And the biggest line item the County Department of Social Services shared was $94.9 million in direct payments of federal dollars to In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) clients. This program—which combined with state funds, expended $189.8 million in Monterey County last year—is meant to help enable people with disabilities or functionality issues to stay in their homes by compensating their caregivers, who may be family members, to help complete tasks of daily living, like cooking or bathing. (IHSS is an alternative for qualifying individuals to assisted living or a nursing home.)

You won’t see these significant expenditures of federal dollars outlined in the big federal bill, which is at a much higher level. Even with all of these Social Services programs added in, Medi-Cal (the state version of Medicaid) is still a massive slice of our pie chart, representing 30.8 percent of direct federal expenditures in Monterey County last year, at roughly $1.2 billion. (A note that this figure is updated from our original publication in March; our original figure of $2 billion included state Medi-Cal funding.)

These millions and billions at the federal and state and even local level are filtered to regular people in the hundreds and thousands—much smaller, more relatable amounts. But what happens in Washington will matter to the many local people who rely on those hundreds.