Trump Administration Notifies Congress About NAFTA Renegotiation

President Donald Trump plans to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told congressional leaders in a letter on Thursday.

The president must give Congress a 90-day notice before beginning talks. The announcement, which comes three days after Lighthizer was sworn in, provides an opportunity for Trump to deliver on a campaign promise to dramatically improve the trade accord for U.S. manufacturers and workers.

The United States seeks to support higher-paying jobs in the United States and to grow the U.S. economy by improving U.S. opportunities under NAFTA, Lighthizer wrote. In particular, we note that NAFTA was negotiated 25 years ago, and while our economy and businesses have changed considerably over that period, NAFTA has not.

At just over a page, the letter offers few insights into the approach Trump plans to take in revamping the trade agreement.

A draft of the letter that leaked at the end of March went on for nearly eight pages, alarming trade skeptics who thought the softer language represented a major climbdown from Trumps tough campaign stance.

Some of the specific goals that were outlined in the leaked draft and remain in the final version are unlikely to quiet these concerns.

Like the earlier version, the new letter points out that digital trade was in its infancy when NAFTA was ratified and that the agreements provisions regarding intellectual property rights need to be updated. It also keeps language about expanding NAFTA to include the intellectual property protections and other regulatory streamlining in more recent trade agreements.

The intellectual property provisions in the now-defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership were among the features that elicited the most criticism from liberal trade skeptics. Public health advocates in particular were wary of clauses that extended patent protections to biologics, fearing that it would make these drugs unaffordable to American trade partners.

Todays notice is markedly vague. But Trumps leaked #NAFTA renegotiation plan described using NAFTA talks to revive parts of the #TPP: pic.twitter.com/e5JOeeuUjZ

Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) May 18, 2017","type":"rich","meta":{"author":"Public Citizen","author_url":"https://twitter.com/Public_Citizen","cache_age":86400,"description":"Todays notice is markedly vague. But Trumps leaked #NAFTA renegotiation plan described using NAFTA talks to revive parts of the #TPP: pic.twitter.com/e5JOeeuUjZ— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) May 18, 2017\n","provider_name":"Twitter","title":"Public Citizen on 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Todays notice is markedly vague. But Trumps leaked #NAFTA renegotiation plan described using NAFTA talks to revive parts of the #TPP : pic.twitter.com/e5JOeeuUjZ
Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) May 18, 2017

Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), ranking member of the trade subcommittee, claim in a letter to Lighthizer that his notice may provide too little specificity to even comply with the law requiring the president to inform Congress of his intentions. The notice period is a requirement of a 2015 law, the Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act.

Some fundamental and critically important questions remain unanswered today. That is particularly true given how different todays one-page final notice is from the eight-page draft we received in March, they wrote.