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

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

Restore the President's Trade Promotion Authority

Not started

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

“Work with Congress to restore the President’s Trade Promotion Authority, which would expedite the negotiation of trade agreements with the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Taiwan, the European Union, and other allies, and keep trade-unrelated provisions out of trade agreements.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Trade Promotion Authority lapsed on 2021-07-01 and nothing in the window revives it. No bill in the 119th Congress carries "Trade Promotion Authority" or "fast track" in its title, none of the 104 public laws touches the authority, and a Federal Register full-text search for the phrase across every document type published since 2025-01-20 returns zero documents. Nor has the administration asked: the 2026 Trade Policy Agenda and 2025 Annual Report, delivered to Congress on 2026-03-02, does not mention Trade Promotion Authority anywhere in its 470 pages. The administration is instead concluding executive agreements — with the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, Korea, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Taiwan, Argentina and others — implemented by tariff proclamation under existing delegations rather than by fast-tracked implementing bills, which is the arrangement the Quote's expedited-negotiation rationale assumes away.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Contested Recommendation from “The Case for Free Trade”; requires Congress, and under the §3b ladder introduction would still be not started — but nothing was even introduced.
  • Negative searches are recorded in docs/research/ch-26.md under the cluster heading for printed p. 801.
  • The administration’s own Trade Policy Agenda is the strongest available negative: it is the document in which an administration asks Congress for negotiating authority, and it does not. Under §3b a formal administration request would have made this attempted; there is none.
Action
restore
Object
Trade Promotion Authority
ID
2102