A standoff between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans over free trade agreements could take a major step toward resolution Thursday with a Senate vote on legislation to help American workers who fall victim to foreign competition.
As part of a plan carefully orchestrated with the White House, the Senate is voting to renew expired portions of Trade Adjustment Assistance, a half-decade-old program that provides retraining and financial support for workers adversely affected by trade.
Senate passage would send the TAA bill to the House for a vote and lead to the White House submitting to Congress, after years of holdups, free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.
Recommended For You
With jobs the dominant political topic, President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats have insisted that the worker aid program be extended as a condition for taking up the free trade pacts. While many Republicans are critical of the TAA program, they have agreed to go along so that the trade agreements, which were signed during the administration of President George W. Bush, can finally be completed.
In a rare instance of concurrence, both Obama and Republicans have made the trade treaties a part of their jobs agenda, saying that once in effect they will increase U.S. exports by some $13 billion a year and create tens of thousands of jobs.
The Senate vote Thursday is to extend some benefits that were added to the TAA program as part of the 2009 economic stimulus act but which expired last February. The 2009 additions included more money for retraining and increased unemployment support and health insurance subsidies. They also extended eligibility to public sector and service industry workers and farmers, and to workers affected by trade with countries that don't have free trade agreements with the United States, such as China and India.
After GOP objections that these additions doubled the cost of the program, previously operated at about $1 billion a year, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., reached a compromise that trimmed some of the 2009 benefits.
Public sector workers will no longer be eligible and unemployment benefits were reduced. The health insurance tax credit was reduced from 80 percent in 2009 to 72.5 percent. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., said the 10-year cost of the compromise would be $962 million.
The vote is still a difficult one for some Republicans. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has close ties to the GOP, urged senators to vote for the TAA bill, saying their votes will be part of the chamber's annual scorecard of how lawmakers vote on key issues. Similarly, the conservative Club for Growth, calling TAA "duplicative, inequitable and inappropriate," said lawmakers should vote no and reminded them that the vote will be part of their annual scorecard.
Democrats, while split on the trade agreements, were solidly behind the TAA extension, and the AFL-CIO asked senators to vote for the compromise and against any amendments that might modify or weaken the TAA program.
On Wednesday several Republicans tried unsuccessfully to restrict the benefits outlined in the compromise. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said TAA overlapped with some 47 employment and training programs operating across nine agencies of the federal government. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, in questioning the eligibility criteria for TAA, noted that employees at Solyndra, the California solar panel company that went bankrupt despite a $535 million federal loan guarantee, were applying for TAA benefits.
But Casey, citing Labor Department figures, said in the two-year period from May 2009, some 186,000 of the 447,000 workers certified as eligible for TAA benefits qualified under the expanded 2009 act. "That is relevant because it was helping folks to be retrained, helping them to get the skills they needed for a new career … during the worst economic catastrophe in 100 years, other than the Great Depression."
The TAA provisions were attached to a largely non-controversial trade bill that extends a program called the General System of Preferences. That program allows some 130 developing countries to ship 4,800 products, mostly raw materials and components, to the United States without paying duties.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
