Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

26. Trade · Notable · Needs Congress · Contested — excluded from counts

Deliver any expanded trade adjustment assistance as direct cash transfers

Not started

806 26. Trade · from “The Case for Free Trade”

“A better approach to trade adjustment assistance, if it must be expanded, is direct cash transfers. Not only would this prevent progressive hijacking of programs and their funding, but cash is the most flexible type of aid.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The condition the Quote sets — "if it must be expanded" — never arose, and no cash-transfer instrument exists. USTR's 2025 Annual Report records that the authorizations for Trade Adjustment Assistance for Workers, for Farmers and for Firms all expired in 2022 and had not been reauthorized as of 2025-12-31, so there was nothing to expand. The two reauthorization bills are in committee and neither converts the program to direct cash: S. 1449, the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reauthorization Act of 2025, restores the existing benefit structure of training, trade readjustment allowances, job search and relocation allowances and the health coverage tax credit, and H.R. 7805, the Trade Adjustment Assistance Modernization Act, was referred to Ways and Means on 2026-03-04. No Federal Register document published since 2025-01-20 proposes cash transfers for trade-displaced workers.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Contested Recommendation from “The Case for Free Trade”; requires Congress.
  • pre_satisfied was considered and rejected. The flag means this specific ask was already satisfied; here the ask is conditional and its condition — an expansion of trade adjustment assistance — has not occurred, which is a different thing from the ask being met. Compare #2116 on the same printed page, where the flag is right because the object is in the asked-for state.
  • Same page cluster as #2098 and #2116; all three rest on the lapse of the TAA statutes in 2022 and are leveled differently because their Quotes ask different things.
  • Checked 2026-09-03 (read-queue ticket 04) against DOL’s own Trade Adjustment Assistance page (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/tradeact), opened for #2098. The premise stays counterfactual: DOL says it “may not issue any determinations and may not accept any new petitions”, the public petition-filing system was decommissioned on 2025-05-14, and no report to Congress has been published since FY2023. There is no expanded trade adjustment assistance, no new certification and no benefit-delivery mechanism to redesign. Nothing here moves the item.
Action
other
Object
Trade adjustment assistance
ID
2115