These are issues Congress likely will deal with in 2018

WASHINGTON >> Congress left town for the holidays with no long-term solutions to any outstanding political and policy quagmires they’re in: immigration, funding the government and a surveillance program national security analysts say is critical to doing their job.

Here are the issues Congress will most likely deal with, ranked.

1. Fund the government by Jan. 19: Congress could not agree on how to fund the government in 2018, so they kicked the can down the road. Now they have a little more than two weeks to either stall again or come to a bipartisan agreement.

The hang-ups: Republicans need Democrats and/ or conservative House lawmakers to pass a spending bill, which means any one of these factions could decide to leverage their votes for a policy issue that is a nonstarter for the other side.

2. Get a deal ending automatic spending cuts: Complicating already-complicated budget negotiations are strict caps on how much Congress can spend each year on domestic and defense spending, a requirement from a 2011 budget deal.

Both Senate Republicans and Democrats say ending these automatic spending cuts is their priority. They must find a way to raise these caps if they want to come to a long-term spending deal.

The hang-ups: Republicans are focused on raising the caps for military spending to give President Donald Trump his requested increase of about $100 billion. Democrats are demanding a dollar-for-dollar raise on domestic spending, too. That could turn off some fiscally inclined Republicans, putting the whole spending bill in jeopardy.

3. Fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program and disaster relief: Lawmakers on both sides generally agree they need to refund CHIP, a program 9 million children rely on that Congress let expire in September. (Right before the holidays, they infused $3 billion to keep it afloat for the next few months.)

Another must-do is issuing tens of billions of dollars to communities ravaged by historically strong hurricanes and wildfires. Republicans and Democrats agree helping communities rebuild is a core function.

The hang-ups: The money. On disaster relief, it may just be too expensive for a majority of Congress to stomach. Before the holiday, the House approved $81 billion in disaster relief, but Democrats said that was not enough, given places like the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico still do not have power.

4. Protect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients: Four months after Trump ended the program that protects young undocumented immigrants, and then tossed it to Congress to deal with, lawmakers haven’t figured out what to do.

There is a bipartisan group in the Senate trying to put a deal together. Powerful GOP senators such as John Cornyn (Texas), Charles Grassley (Iowa), John McCain (Arizona) and Jeff Flake (Arizona) support DACA recipient protections.

The hang-ups: It seems that for every Republican who wants recipients protected, there is another who sees it as amnesty.

Trump is demanding money for his border wall in exchange for extending protections. A wall is a nonstarter for most Democrats and Republicans.

5. Propping up subsidies for Obamacare: This is top priority for one Republican in particular, Maine Sen. Susan Collins. She got an agreement from Senate Republican leaders that she would vote for the tax bill if they voted on a bipartisan bill to continue payments that help lower-income people with health care costs.

The hang-ups: A vote in the Senate doesn’t mean a bill will become a law. House Republicans don’t seem too interested in voting on something that could save Obamacare, especially when a number of them are still peeved that it exists.

“She may be out of luck,” said Steve Bell, a former GOP budget analyst, now with the Bipartisan Policy Institute.