Congress faces busy new year, maybe shutdown

Agenda includes immigration, health care, caps on spending

WASHINGTON >> Congress faces a jam-packed todo list when it returns this week, with deadlines looming on difficult issues — including how to fund the government and avoid a shutdown, stabilizing the nation’s health-insurance program for poor children, and whether to shield young undocumented immigrants from deportation.

Fresh off a party-line vote to overhaul the tax code, the negotiations will test whether Congress and the White House still have the potential to craft any form of bipartisan agreement. If so, several of the year’s most contested issues might be resolved with months to spare before the 2018 midterm campaign heats up.

If not, the government could soon be on the verge of a shutdown, with pressing questions regarding health care, immigration and other policies left unresolved. Also on the agenda is emer-

gency relief for regions upended by last year’s natural disasters, a key national security program and the fate of an agreement to stabilize health insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act.

A big unknown is whether the shortened timeline will be an asset in addressing issues before Congress, or a hindrance.

On Wednesday, senior congressional leaders from both parties will meet at the Capitol with White House budget director Mick Mulvaney and legislative-affairs director Marc Short to renew talks on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which expires on March 5. In September, President Donald Trump decided to sunset the program — started under the Obama administration — that protects 700,000 young immigrants, often called “dreamers,” from deportation.

Congressional Republicans and the White House have demanded that any deal to protect these immigrants include stronger border enforcement — but exactly what that looks like is expected to be a key sticking point in negotiations.

Democrats are under pressure from Hispanic lawmakers and progressive activists to reject any government funding deal that does not resolve the issue. Democratic senators have helped pass multiple funding deals that did not include DACA protections, including one in December.

About 22,000 DACA recipients failed to renew applications after the Trump administration gave them 30 days to do so in September, with reports emerging of some applications lost in the mail. At least 7,800 people in this group had lost DACA status by December, and the rest will lose protection before March, according to the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank.

“If Democrats don’t hold the line and ensure dreamers get protected, the unity between the grass roots and the elected party will shatter,” said Ben Wikler, Washington director of the progressive group MoveOn.org. “Democrats and Republicans have already kicked this can down the road three times already.”

Beyond DACA, lawmakers will also have to agree to new government funding levels or pass another shortterm extension of spending limits — known as a continuing resolution — by Jan. 19. Failure to do so would cause a government shutdown, which would cost the economy about $6.5 billion every week it lasts.

Keeping the government funded at existing levels (or increasing spending) would put Congress on track to trigger automatic spending cuts through what is called the sequester, because of a 2011 law that imposed caps on spending. Congress must raise these caps, as it did in 2013 and 2015, by February to avoid these across-theboard cuts to programs.

But Democrats and Republicans have been unable to resolve an impasse over how to raise the caps. Republicans passed a bill in December to increase military funding alone by $650 billion through Sept. 30. Congressional Democrats have held firm that every dollar increase in military spending must be met by an equal increase in domestic spending, in line with previous agreements in the past to avoid the sequester.

Lawmakers will have to increase the debt ceiling by March, when the Treasury Department can no longer meet the federal government’s financial obligations without additional borrowing, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Similarly unresolved is the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which 9 million children use to help meet their medical costs. Right before the Christmas break, Congress plowed $3 billion into CHIP — money that will prevent 1.9 million children from losing coverage in January, according to the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute. But that temporary solution keeps CHIP funded for only three months, and state health programs throughout the country have begun notifying families that funding could expire.

The law authorizing the government to obtain communications of foreign intelligence targets without an individualized warrant — a process that also collects emails and phone calls of any Americans in communication with the foreign targets — is set to expire on Jan. 19. The program, originally set to end on Jan. 1, was extended for three weeks at the last minute before the Christmas recess.

Before the Christmas break, the House approved an $81 billion relief package for victims of recent hurricanes and wildfires in California. Democrats criticized that plan as inadequate, particularly for the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, which are still struggling with widespread power outages. Democrats in the Senate rejected the House package right before the Christmas recess, but members of both parties agree on the imminent need to allocate emergency funding.

Senate Republican leadership had promised Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, passage of a bill to shore up the Affordable Care Act’s individual markets in exchange for her yes vote on the GOP tax package.

The Republican tax bill is expected to undercut insurance markets by eliminating the individual mandate — a requirement under the ACA that Americans buy insurance or face a penalty.

Collins has backed one measure to give insurers $4.5 billion to compensate costs for the very sick and another that would restore “cost-sharing reductions” for poor people. (The Trump administration cut off these payments.) Either one would help offset at least some of the impact to the markets caused by the tax law and other administration actions.