Congress Split On Trade Assistance Law

by Mike Godfrey, Tax-News.com, Washington

07 July 2011

The United States House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee has issued a notice of a meeting to consider the draft implementing proposals for the pending free trade agreements (FTAs) with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, but without the extension to Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) which the government had included.

Dave Camp, the Chairman of the Committee, on which Republicans have the majority, scheduled the meeting for July 7, even though he was aware that a similar meeting of the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee, arranged for June 30, had had to be cancelled when no Republican members attended, due to their objection to a TAA extension being added into the implementing proposals for the FTA with South Korea.

The TAA programme is designed to provide a variety of re-employment services and benefits to workers who have lost their jobs or suffered a reduction of hours and wages as a result of increased imports or shifts in production outside the US. Since its expiry in February this year, any extension of the TAA programme has encountered opposition from Republicans as they look for additional spending cuts in order to reduce the federal government’s fiscal deficit.

In a letter to President Barack Obama, the Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee wrote that they were concerned at “last minute attempts to include provisions expanding TAA in the South Korea FTA implementing bill. We believe such actions... unduly infringe on the rights of members of the Senate to carefully weigh and debate the merits of TAA.”

In reply to Camp’s meeting notice, United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk issued a statement that, while he welcomed the effort to move the three pending trade agreements forward in the House, he noted that the meeting’s documents “do not provide a path forward for the bipartisan agreement to renew TAA, and therefore are at odds with the Administration’s stated intentions for advancing a package that includes both the FTAs and assistance for workers adversely impacted by trade.”

He added that “the Administration remains committed to advancing the renewal of a robust TAA programme that is the product of a bipartisan process, together with the pending trade agreements, as soon as possible."

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