Trump Preps for Immigration Crackdown With Key Appointments

Trump Preps for Immigration Crackdown With Key Appointments

An overcrowded fenced area holding families at a Border Patrol station is seen in McAllen
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By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey
Monday, November 11, 2024

Happy Veterans Day, and our sincere thanks to those brave men and women who served. Here’s the latest.

Trump Continues to Staff Up for His Second Term

The Trump transition continues to take shape. With 10 weeks to go before his second inauguration and speculation swirling about how far he will go to implement his campaign agenda, President-elect Donald Trump has begun fleshing out the top ranks of his administration. Following last week’s appointment of campaign manager Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff, Trump has also named:

* Tom Homan, who was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Trump’s first term, to be “Border Czar.” Homan, who was also a contributor to Project 2025, is likely to be the point person tasked with carrying out Trump’s promised crackdown on illegal immigration, including Trump’s oft-repeated pledge to deport millions of undocumented migrants.

“It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous,” Homan told CBS News’s “60 Minutes” in a recent interview. But when asked if it would be possible to deport undocumented immigrants without separating families, Homan suggested that “families could be deported together.”

* Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York to serve as ambassador to the United Nations. Stefanik has been the chair of the House Republican Conference since 2021. She replaced Rep. Liz Cheney as a member of House GOP leadership after Cheney was ousted from the role for her criticism of Trump.

“The choice of Stefanik signals a more combative US posture toward the UN,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reports. “Stefanik has frequently criticized the international organization, particularly over its criticism of Israel, and last month said the Biden administration should consider a “complete reassessment” of US funding for the UN if the Palestinian Authority continues to pursue a push to revoke Israel’s UN membership.”

* Lee Zeldin, a former congressman from New York, as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Zeldin is expected to try to roll back the Biden administration’s environmental and climate regulations. “He will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet,” Trump said in a statement. “He will set new standards on environmental review and maintenance, that will allow the United States to grow in a healthy and well-structured way.”

The League of Conservation Voters said that Zeldin had voted against key climate legislation and, as a member of Congress, had a lifetime score of just 14% on their environmental scorecard.

Trump is also reportedly set to name Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy. Miller is known for his hardline stance on immigration and reportedly was a key architect of Trump’s plans for mass deportations. He’s been called a white nationalist.

As Trump continues to staff up, he’s reportedly been soliciting input from friends and allies — and is publicly pressing the Senate Republicans vying to take over Sen. Mitch McConnell’s leadership position to agree to recess appointments, essentially a way to avoid Senate confirmation and the associated vetting process for appointees to his administration and the courts.

As he looks to reward loyalists, Trump also announced that he would not be asking Nikki Haley, his former U.N. Ambassador and rival for the Republican presidential nomination, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to join his second administration.

Why it matters: We’ve heard some Trump supporters posit that he wouldn’t fully follow through on his campaign promises if elected, harkening back to arguments that he should be taken seriously, not literally. His appointments so far suggest otherwise, though in a new interview with The Washington Post, Homan declined to commit to deporting millions right away, saying he would look at the available budget and focus on recent arrivals and threats to public safety. “We’ve got to go for the worst first. And that’s what we’re going to do,” he said.

Congress Set to Punt Shutdown Deadline to March: Report

The 118th Congress returns tomorrow for a lame-duck session. Among the items on lawmakers’ to-do list: extend federal funding past a December 20 government shutdown deadline.

The Washington Post’s Jacob Bogage reports that lawmakers are considering a stopgap that would fund federal agencies into March, buying time for the Senate to begin confirming Trump’s Cabinet nominees and for Republicans to hash out their tax plans.

“Democrats, who loathe government shutdowns, are expected to largely accept the proposal, though leaders say they hope to fast-track annual appropriations bills rather than another short-term one,” Bogage writes, adding that Democrats could still exert some leverage over spending bills, even if they are the minority in both the House and Senate, where the new Republican majority won’t have enough votes to avoid a filibuster.

Will Huge Deficits Weigh on GOP Plan to Slash Taxes?

As Republicans prepare to forge a massive tax bill that could potentially pass via a party-line vote early next year, a crucial question hangs over their heads: How much larger are they willing to make the budget deficit, which came in at roughly $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 2024?

That limit, which The Wall Street Journal’s Richard Rubin refers to as “The Number,” will determine just how aggressive Republicans can be as they pursue a slew of tax cuts promised at various times during the campaign by President-elect Donald Trump, including an extension of the 2017 tax cuts, a reduction in the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15% and the elimination of taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security. The legislation could include new spending, as well, with funding for border security initiatives, among other things.

Some Republicans will push for extensive cuts with little concern for the deficit, while more fiscally conservative lawmakers will seek some degree of restraint. The same dynamic played out in 2017, when lawmakers settled on a 10-year cost of $1.5 trillion for their tax package, even as some pushed for a larger number. But whatever the number ends up being, it looks like a larger deficit and increased debt are likely this time around.

“We’re not going to have something that’s going to have zero deficit impact,” Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma told the Journal. “That’s not going to happen.” At the same time, Lankford said that lawmakers will have to address the existing deficit. “You can’t just keep saying it will get better magically some day with pixie dust,” he said.

Until Republicans have a limit in mind, though, it’s hard to say what the cuts will look like. “You can say yes to everybody until you have a number,” former Rep. Peter Roskam told the Journal. “Once the number is locked in, that’s when real choices are made. You’re basically playing a version of lifeboat. Who’s in? Who’s out?”

The likely tax cut vehicle: To pass the tax package, Republicans are expected to use a legislative process known as budget reconciliation, which would enable the bill to advance through the Senate with just 50 votes. The same approach was used by Republicans for their 2017 tax package, and by Democrats for spending bills in 2021 and 2022.

For the process to work, though, lawmakers in both the House and the Senate must agree on the overall size of the tax cuts and budgetary effects. Ryan Ellis, a conservative tax analyst, told the Journal that he expects the deficit number for the tax package to be close to zero – far short of the estimated $4 trillion cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts, let alone the host of other tax cuts Trump has put forth.

“There’s a lot of guys in the House who care very much about the level of debt and deficits,” Ellis said. “They came to Washington to cut spending and that’s the way they want to reduce deficits. They’re great with wanting to keep tax relief in place too.”

The solution to the basic math problem for many Republicans, especially those in the House, will likely revolve around steep spending cuts as a way to reduce the net cost of the tax cuts. But it’s not clear that lawmakers will be able to find anything like the trillions of dollars in spending cuts they’s need to offset the proposed tax cuts. “The momentum in the House is going to be all around spending cuts, and it’s just not realistic to think that you can get all the way to several trillion dollars in politically viable spending cuts alone,” Ellis said.

One option would be to essentially ignore the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts, as suggested by Republican Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, who is expected to lead the Finance Committee. Crapo said earlier this year that he would consider setting the cost of extending the 2017 cuts to zero by using a “current policy” basis rather than a “current law” basis in the reconciliation bill. That would “save” roughly $4 trillion, clearing the way for a new set of tax cuts.

Republicans will have other gimmicks to offset the costs, or at least look like they are doing so. They could add Trump’s proposed tariffs to the legislation and project enormous revenues from them, even if those revenues have little chance of materializing. And they can assume their tax cuts will spur higher growth and thus more robust tax revenues, even if that growth is speculative or exaggerated.

The potential difficulty of getting all these elements right has led some lawmakers to say they want to take their time. “We’ve got a year. I’d rather take that year,” Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said. “The clock is ticking on this, but we don’t have to hop on this in the first few months.”

A warning from Moody’s: Late last week, Moody’s Ratings said that a Republican sweep in Washington — which looks likely, with Republicans just four seats away from control of the House and 17 undecided races as of Monday — raises risks for U.S. sovereign debt as lawmakers move to slash taxes.

“In the absence of policy measures to help limit fiscal deficits, the federal government's deteriorating fiscal strength will increasingly weigh on the US sovereign credit profile,” Moody’s analysts wrote. “Given the fiscal policies Trump promised while campaigning, and the high likelihood of their passage because of the changing composition of Congress, the risks to US fiscal strength have increased.”

Moody’s is the last of the three major ratings agencies to give U.S. sovereign debt a top rating. A year ago, Moody’s changed its outlook for the U.S. from stable to negative, citing excessive deficits and ongoing political dysfunction.

Send your feedback to yrosenberg@thefiscaltimes.com.

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