26. Trade · Major · Needs Congress · Contested — excluded from counts
Rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Printed page 801 26. Trade · from “The Case for Free Trade”
“Rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), whose 11 members are developing institutional trade norms in an important geopolitical region without U.S. input or involvement.”
What has happened
- Not started
Nothing. The phrases "Trans-Pacific Partnership" and "Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement" appear in no Federal Register document of any type published since 2025-01-20, no bill in the 119th Congress carries either name, and USTR's own docket shows the opposite approach: a Section 301 campaign and a series of bilateral "reciprocal, fair and balanced trade" frameworks with the European Union, Korea, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, and Taiwan, rather than accession to a plurilateral agreement. The Presidential Memorandum of 2025-01-20, "America First Trade Policy", set the framework, and no accession step of any kind followed.
No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- Contested Recommendation from “The Case for Free Trade”.
- Negative searches run this session:
- Federal Register API,
conditions[term]="Trans-Pacific Partnership", publication date ≥ 2025-01-20, all document types — count 0. - Federal Register API,
conditions[term]="Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement", same window — count 0. bills.ndjsontitles matchingTrans.Pacific|TPP|CPTPP— none. The only near miss is the Pacific Partnership Act (H.R. 3332 / S. 1740, 2025-05-13), whose text reads “To bolster United States engagement with the Pacific Islands region” — a different subject; read at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr3332ih/html/BILLS-119hr3332ih.htm- USTR Federal Register documents 2025-01-20 to 2026-08-26 (66 records in the Corpus): no notice of intent to accede, no consultation notice, no hearing.
- Federal Register API,
- Direction of travel, Primary sources loaded this session:
- Presidential Memorandum, “America First Trade Policy”, 2025-01-20 — https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/30/2025-02032/america-first-trade-policy
- USTR, “Implementing Certain Tariff-Related Elements of the U.S.-EU Framework on an Agreement on Reciprocal, Fair, and Balanced Trade”, 2025-09-25 — https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/09/25/2025-18660/implementing-certain-tariff-related-elements-of-the-us-eu-framework-on-an-agreement-on-reciprocal (parallel notices for Korea 2025-12-04, Switzerland/Liechtenstein 2025-12-18 and Taiwan 2026-05-28 are in the Corpus).
- Rejoining would need Congress in any case (
requires_congressis set); nothing was introduced.
- Action
- reinstate
- Object
- Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP/CPATPP)
- ID
- 2106