March Washington D.C. Preview

QUICK FIX

 

 

— As a bipartisan tax bill remains in limbo following its passage in the House on Jan. 31, it’s at risk of falling victim to Hill gridlock.   — After buying more time to avoid a government shutdown, Congress has until March 8 to finalize the Ag-FDA appropriations and five other spending bills.   — The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is set to unveil long-awaited draft rules outlining when critical infrastructure providers must report breaches and ransom payments to the government.

 

 

AGRICULTURE Finalizing appropriations for fiscal 2024: Congress approved another temporary spending patch Thursday night, avoiding a shutdown of the Agriculture Department, the FDA and a handful of other government agencies on Saturday and buying more time to finalize the Ag-FDA appropriations and five other spending bills that congressional leaders aim to pass this week. Congress officially has until March 8 to clear that package.   — Among the details lawmakers are working to pin down in the Ag-FDA bill is the spending level for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC. The program, which feeds millions of low-income babies and mothers and has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades, has become a partisan flashpoint in the talks. Congress is now poised to boost WIC funds by several hundred million dollars this fiscal year but still less than the $1 billion increase the White House and Democratic lawmakers had sought.   — Democrats and anti-hunger advocates worry that without the full $1 billion in added funds, growing costs and participation rates in individual states will force program administrators to turn away or wait-list eligible babies and mothers. House GOP negotiators, however, have dug in against a bigger increase, arguing that they want to return WIC to pre-Covid benefit levels. — Meredith Lee Hill

 

 

TECHNOLOGY Movement on kids’ online safety: After a high-profile Senate Judiciary hearing with tech CEOs in January, the committee’s top Republican will move the panel’s bills on kids’ safety to the floor this week. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he’ll pursue an expedited voting process — known as unanimous consent — on March 6 to pass a package of five bills seeking to hold tech platforms accountable for hosting harmful content.   The package includes the EARN IT Act and STOP CSAM Act, which would both peel back tech’s liability shield to let individuals sue social media platforms hosting child sexual abuse content.   — However, the bills will likely be blocked by Wyden, who stopped a similar attempt in February. Schumer has said passing kids’ online safety is a priority issue, but funding the government is the Senate’s top agenda item. — Rebecca Kern

 

 

EDUCATION Broader student loan debt relief: The Biden administration has new plans to allow the Education Department to discharge the student loans of borrowers who are experiencing financial hardship and would be unlikely to pay their debts.   The department has finished negotiated rulemaking and is drafting a final proposal that calls for relief for borrowers facing hardship, borrowers whose balances have ballooned past what they initially borrowed because of interest and borrowers eligible for relief under existing programs but who never applied, among other categories. That final plan is expected sometime in May. The White House’s ambitions to expand student debt relief come as Biden makes debt relief efforts an essential part of his reelection campaign.   — Expanding the Pell Grant: House lawmakers are advancing bipartisan efforts to expand the Pell Grant, which provides need-based aid to help low-income students pay for higher education to cover short-term job training programs. The Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act has the backing of the top lawmakers on the House education committee — Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) and ranking member Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.).   The bill would allow students to use the Pell Grants to pay for education programs as short as eight weeks at all types of institutions, including online and for-profit schools. Currently, it can be used only for programs with a 15-week minimum. — Mackenzie Wilkes

 

 

TAX Can a bipartisan tax bill pass the Senate? One big question hangs over federal tax policy right now — will the Senate pass a rare bipartisan tax bill or will that measure become another victim of Hill gridlock?   The House, which has been the more unpredictable chamber in Congress in recent years, already passed the tax bill overwhelmingly on Jan. 31 — with 357 votes for and just 70 against.   — But essentially, there has been no movement on the bill — which was negotiated by Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) — since the House vote.   The bill, released after more than a year of talks, would expand the Child Tax Credit, which has been a priority for Democrats.   — For Republicans, the Wyden-Smith plan would restore three key tax breaks for businesses. The $78 billion package, which is being fully paid for by cracking down on the pandemic-era Employee Retention Tax Credit, would also expand the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, offer tax relief to areas hit by disasters and enact a treaty-like measure that would tamp down on double taxation between the U.S. and Taiwan.   — For all that, it’s the Child Tax Credit expansion that has caused the tax bill to become stuck in the mud in the Senate. A sizable group of Senate Republicans — including Mike Crapo of Idaho, the top Republican on the Finance Committee — have issues with how that expansion is structured, particularly with the so-called lookback provision.   That provision allows taxpayers to use earnings from the previous or current year to calculate their child credit amount, which supporters say has been a common tactic used over the years that would help families keep a key incentive even if they hit unforeseen bumps in the road.   Those supporters include a range of conservative groups. But other analysts and organizations on the right — not to mention those GOP senators — say they’re worried that the lookback provision would give parents an incentive to drop out of the workforce.   — It’s not clear how that dispute will be resolved. Crapo and other Senate Republicans seek a Finance Committee markup of the tax bill or perhaps an agreement that would give them the opportunity to try to amend the bill on the Senate floor.   But Wyden is starting to sound impatient, and supporters of the tax bill almost certainly wouldn’t allow the lookback provision to be scrapped, given that it’s one of a handful of improvements to the child credit that made it through all those negotiations.   — Any changes at all in the Senate could be difficult for supporters of the bill to stomach because that would mean the House would have to vote again. For Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, that could leave a couple of options in the coming weeks, like seeking to attach the bill to a broader spending measure or taking his chances by bringing the tax bill to the floor as a standalone measure. — Bernie Becker

 

 

EMPLOYMENT AND IMMIGRATION NCAA vs. NLRB: While college basketball heads into March madness, it’s a last-place team that might leave a lasting legacy.   — Members of the Dartmouth men’s team are set to vote March 5 on whether to unionize under a local affiliate of the Service Employees International Union — and become the first in high-level collegiate athletics to do so.   Dartmouth administrators and the NCAA, college sports’ main governing body, are fighting the National Labor Relations Board’s decision to allow an election, as well as its determination that basketball players qualify as workers under the National Labor Relations Act.   Jennifer Abruzzo, the NLRB’s top prosecutor, has made clear she believes players are school employees and is pursuing a case against the University of Southern California for allegedly misclassifying college athletes.   — If the Dartmouth basketball team succeeds in unionizing, others might soon follow, adding to an increasingly volatile landscape for the lucrative college sports industry. University and NCAA leaders have pushed Congress to address the situation by granting new authority to prop up the existing system, though it has not gained meaningful momentum to date.   The situation could also put a target on the NLRB’s back. Several businesses have recently embraced a legal theory that the nearly 90-year-old agency is unconstitutional, and it is possible that others could join in to prevent the NLRB from upsetting the lucrative world of college athletics. — Nick Niedzwiadek

 

 

CYBERSECURITY Breach reporting kicks into high gear: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will unveil long-anticipated draft rules outlining when critical infrastructure providers must report breaches and ransom payments to the government.   The forthcoming regulations are the upshot of Sen. Gary Peters’ (D-Mich.) 2022 Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act, which promised to pull back the veil of corporate secrecy and give the U.S. government a more comprehensive look at how many hacks are pummeling the country.   But those draft rules are set to be released just two months after a much more controversial SEC incident reporting rule — which requires disclosure to the public, not the government — has kicked into effect, raising questions about whether the national security benefits of CIRCIA will outweigh the overlapping regulatory burden it and the SEC move place on companies.   — Down to the wire on 702: The government’s most highly touted, and frequently pilloried, electronic surveillance tool is also likely to be a common theme on the Hill this month.   Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act doesn’t technically expire until April 19, but with a pair of government funding deadlines set to come to a head early in March, national security hawks in Congress are sure to see this month as one of the last, best opportunities to guarantee a multiyear renewal of the program.   That’s guaranteed to roil left-leaning private hawks and conservative law enforcement skeptics since the surveillance tool — which allows the government to collect the communications of specific foreigners located abroad — can also sweep in data from Americans.   They’ll fight tooth and nail for a standalone debate, which many see as a better path to overhauling the program’s privacy provisions. — John Sakellariadis

 

 

ENERGY The next Biden energy rule under fire: The Biden administration continues to implement its climate agenda, although not in the way many supporters of strong climate action would like, with agencies walking back the scope of or timelines for upcoming regulations.   — EPA is expected to advance its final auto emissions rules in March, which will look rather different from the 2023 proposal. According to sources familiar with the final draft, still under review at the White House, the requirements for model year 2032 are projected to lead automakers to 67 percent of electric vehicle sales to comply.   The big difference is that EPA has pushed back how quickly that level will be achieved, leaving greater leaps for later years instead of front-loading them. The change is in response to automakers who say they need more time to ramp up production and deploy infrastructure, but environmentalists are angry because it will mean more emissions over time. — Alex Guillén

 

 

 

 

TRADE House eyes trade legislation after long delay: House Ways and Means lawmakers are expected to unveil long-stalled trade legislation this spring as they ride the momentum of an unexpected bipartisan tax package victory.   The committee is nearing a deal on bipartisan legislation to renew a long-expired tariff relief program for developing nations and could hold a markup on that bill as soon as this month. A bill to renew the Generalized System of Preferences, which expired at the end of 2020, “has a lot of momentum,” Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.), head of the Ways and Means subcommittee on trade, said Feb. 13.   — Any legislation that passes the House would still need to go through the Senate, where lawmakers could seek their own changes to any bill before it potentially reaches President Joe Biden’s desk. But the Senate is already on record in support of renewal of GSP and the Miscellaneous Tariff bill, another tariff relief program. In 2021, the upper chamber voted 91-4 to renew both programs during debate on the CHIPS Act, though the provision was later stripped out of the final bill.   The exact contours of the tariff relief package remain in flux. But one former Republican staffer with knowledge of the talks said the final agreement is likely to resemble the 2021 Senate bill, though there could be slight changes to nations’ eligibility requirements.   — Progress on that legislation could add new energy to a separate effort that would reform or eliminate a tariff loophole that allows small shipments — many from China — to enter the U.S. duty-free, though those talks are not as near to a conclusion.   And, though less likely, Republicans could even go so far as to push for a vote on revoking China’s normal trade status later in the year — a move that would seek to force Biden and Democrats into a difficult political choice before the November election. — Gavin Bade