Trump’s 2018 agenda may prove ambitious
Congress could struggle to make progress on GOP priorities
WASHINGTON – President Trump may have big policy plans for 2018, but political distractions are likely to shadow prospects of big legislative achievements.
White House officials say Trump wants to rein in the threat from North Korea and list four top domestic priorities on his 2018 agenda: repealing and replacing President Obama’s 2010 health care law, welfare reform, immigration and a new infrastructure plan.
“I would expect to see those four areas, as well as national security, which never goes away,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.
Yet the Republican-controlled Con-
gress has been struggling to pass some of Trump’s major priorities since his election — and their challenges will only increase in 2018. The GOP’s bare majority in the Senate will shrink when Alabama Democrat Doug Jones is sworn in.
In January, lawmakers will have to confront a thicket of unfinished business. What’s more, they will be consumed with their own 2018 midterm elections — and the increasingly contentious Russia investigations.
“As everybody in Washington knows, a midterm election year is a year when most legislation comes to a standstill,” said David Cohen, a political science professor at the University of Akron. Here are seven key issues Trump and Congress will confront: North Korea
Trump will lobby China and other countries to twist the economic screws on North Korea in the hopes of forcing that rogue nation to give up its nuclear weapons program.
Trump and his advisers hope to settle the dispute diplomatically but have not ruled out a military strike.
Infrastructure
In his 2018 budget proposal, Trump sought $200 billion over 10 years to spend on infrastructure, leveraging private-sector spending to focus federal dollars on “transformative” projects.
That went nowhere in 2017. But the president plans to rev up that push early next year with the hope that Democrats will cooperate. Infrastructure spending is generally a bipartisan issue, and few dispute the need to improve the nation’s highway and bridges. But Trump and Democrats have already outlined competing plans, and conservatives are likely to oppose massive new spending.
Health care
Trump insists he has not given up on his goal of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, even though Republicans in Congress could not muster enough votes to deliver on that longpromised goal this year.
After Congress passed a massive tax bill in December that repealed Obamacare’s individual mandate, Trump declared the law was “essentially” repealed and said lawmakers would work together to find a replacement. However, the law is barely touched.
Overhauling Obamacare will only get more complicated in 2018, as Republicans will have just 51 seats in the Senate. And previous efforts to nix Obamacare sparked intense anger among voters — something lawmakers might not want to reignite when many of them will be on the ballot.
Immigration
Congress has a March deadline to decide the fate of about 700,000 immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally when they were children. Trump nixed an Obama-era program that shielded them from deportation, but he also said Congress should figure out a legislative fix.
Critics have called the Obama protections a form of “amnesty” and suggested those young immigrants have taken jobs from Americans. But there’s bipartisan support in Congress and in the public to grant legal status and even a path to citizenship.
Welfare reform
In announcing a new major legislative priority following the tax-cut bill, Trump said welfare reform is “desperately needed in our country.”
A Trump budget proposal last year called for adding work requirements to some government programs and tightening eligibility requirements for lowincome tax credits.
Iran
Trump announced in October that he no longer would certify that Iran is in compliance with an Obama-era deal in which Tehran pledged to give up the means to make nuclear weapons while the U.S. and allies ease economic sanctions. Instead, Trump called on Congress to improve the agreement, and its fate is likely to come to a head in 2018.
The debt limit
The U.S. Treasury will run out of money to pay its bills sometime in the spring — unless Congress and the president agree on legislation to raise the nation’s debt limit.
Conservatives have generally opposed increasing the nation’s borrowing authority, so Trump will likely have to negotiate with Democrats.