Politico: 5 Things Trump Did This Week While You Weren't Looking
1. USDA withdraws a protection for small farmers
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The Obama administration’s move was a long-awaited victory for small farmers, who had been arguing for years that larger producers were dictating unfair prices to farmers and retaliating against them if they spoke out—and the bar for proving illegal activity was too high. But their win, it turns out, was short-lived: After delaying the rule’s effective date in February, the Trump administration announced this week that it will withdraw it altogether. GIPSA also abandoned a proposed rule, also issued last December, aimed at protecting chicken growers from unfair or predatory practices by large producers. Industry groups and many GOP lawmakers applauded the moves, arguing that the rules would have increased litigation costs and raised prices for consumers, while small farmer groups and Democrats slammed the changes. Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, was a rare GOP voice of dissent. “They’re just pandering to big corporations,” he said.
2. IRS ramps up enforcement of Obamacare
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So far, however, the administration has left the mandate alone—and this week the Internal Revenue Service took a step to strengthen it. The agency said that it will not accept 2017 tax returns that don‘t disclose the taxpayer’s health-insurance status or specify whether the taxpayer qualifies for an exemption. That disclosure is required under the ACA, but in the first two years since the mandate took effect, the IRS still processed tax returns that left the question blank, giving some Americans a backdoor way to evade the rule. Now, in something of a surprise, the IRS is closing that loophole.
3. Treasury declines to label China a currency manipulator—again
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In the six months since, the “North Korean problem” has only grown worse and China has proven reluctant to help, as Trump has said on Twitter. But when Treasury released its newest foreign currency report this week, it once again did not label China a currency manipulator. (In a typical White House, this wouldn’t be a surprise: China hasn’t pushed down its currency in recent years.) Elsewhere in the report, Treasury dropped Taiwan from its “currency watch list” and declined to add Thailand to the list, moves that both garnered criticism from some financial experts who said the countries have been interfering in foreign exchange markets. Taken together, the new report suggests that, at least on currency issues, Trump is adopting a conventional White House strategy, much like that of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
4. A new pipeline gets the green light
In October 2015, the Bureau of Land Management ruled that the Cadiz water pipeline, a plan to pump groundwater 43 miles from a desert aquifer to Southern California, would require the bureau’s authorization—a victory for environmentalists who argued that the project would deplete the important aquifer. But under Trump, BLM reversed its own finding, releasing a letter this week that said the pipeline no longer requires agency approval.
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5. A setback for NAFTA renegotiations
When Mexico, Canada and the United States began renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement in August, they pledged to complete the process before the end of the year—understanding that a deal would get only harder to reach during the 2018 Mexican presidential election. But this week, the three nations effectively gave up on that timeline, pushing back the next round of negotiations until late November over "significant conceptual gaps among the parties," and admitting that the talks could stretch into 2018.
http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/20/trump-policy-obamacare-china-farmers-000563