policy b

I will then assign you a member of Congress and your lobbying position (mine)--> (Rep. Nita Lowey of New York's 17th district, opposing the TPP). I will attempt to assign everyone a member of Congress who opposed CAFTA in 2005 and supported the Korea FTA in 2011, or vice versa, to ensure that you get a member that is somewhat persuadable. 

The policy brief should be a minimum of 5 pages, double-spaced, including all tables and references. There is no maximum number of pages. All sources should be cited via footnotes. You will submit the policy brief via Canvas. For every 24 hours that the policy brief is turned in late, your grade on the assignment will be reduced by 10 percent. 

Scenario: It is summer 2019. Despite declaring a national emergency in February, President Trump does not have enough funding to fulfill his 2016 campaign promise of building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. He needs $8.6 billion more for the wall.1 The White House devises a plan to reverse themselves on one campaign promise in order to achieve the more crucial wall construction promise. President Trump is willing to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) into law on the condition that he gets his wall funding. A loose coalition of Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives are willing to go along with the plan. However, the vote count is uncertain, and the plan may fail.

Due to the Fast Track trade authority rules, the wall funding bill and the bill implementing the TPP cannot be combined into a single bill. At this point in time, the wall funding bill has passed the House and Senate. Consistent with legislative history, the TPP is expected to easily pass the Senate. Therefore, the main battle for the fate of the TPP is in the House. 

Assignment: Imagine that you are a staff member at a lobbying group that has an interest in the TPP. Your goal is to persuade a member of Congress to vote with you on the TPP. I will randomly assign you to lobby a particular member of the House. Your position on the TPP – 

1 See: 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-proposes-47-trillion-budget-with-domesticcuts-86-billion-in-wall-funding/2019/03/11/de11cfa4-43fe-11e9-90f0-0ccfeec87a61_story.htm

support or opposition – will also be randomly assigned. You will write a policy brief addressed to the trade policy legislative assistant.

Since the legislative assistant is familiar with the TPP in general, in your policy brief you do not need to explain what the TPP is. Your policy brief should begin with one or more arguments that are members of Congress in general may find convincing. You can use information presented in class to develop these arguments. Once you lay out these general argument(s), you must link possible effects of the TPP back to the concerns of the particular congressional district and the particular member of Congress. 

You will be graded on how well you do the following: 

1) Demonstrate understanding of one or more arguments for or against the TPP generally. 

2) Include specific information about the TPP’s sectoral effects. 

3) Include specific information about the policy concerns of the member of Congress and his or her district. 

Resources: You will need to do research to determine how the TPP affects specific economic sectors and the extent to which those specific sectors are economically important to your congressional district.

The report of the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) on the probable effects of the TPP should be a key resource for you:

https://www.usitc.gov/publications/industry_econ_analysis_332/2016/trans_pacific_partnersh ip_agreement_likely_impact.htm

Particularly useful for you will be tables ES.5 on page 28, ES.6 on page 30, and ES.8 on page 35. If the USITC results are not supportive of your position, you can also choose to attack the USITC methodology itself. Additional opinionated information about the interpretation of CGE models is here: 

• https://www.cato.org/publications/free-trade-bulletin/how-not-use-internationaltrade-commissions-economic-analysis-trade 

• http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/trade-and-jobs-2016-04.pdf 

Most government data on industries is published at the county level, not the congressional district level. Therefore, you will first have to determine which counties are within your congressional district. These maps may help determine which counties are in the district: 

https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/printable/congress.html

County-level data on agricultural commodity production is available here: 

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2012/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_2_County_Level/

2 See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_assistant 

County-level data on jobs in each sector is available here: 

https://www.bls.gov/cew/data.htm 

Note that for both agricultural production and jobs data, the USDA and BLS may choose not to disclose the county-level data. In certain counties, there may be so few businesses that publishing the data may reveal sensitive business information of a particular company. 

With the sector-specific impacts, you do not need to worry about being extremely precise with matching counties to your district and the USITC sectors with the BLS and USDA classifications. These classifications do not match up exactly, so just attempt to be approximately correct. Feel free to write explanatory notes in footnotes about how you arrived at your calculations. 

To get a sense of the policy issues that your member of Congress cares about, search for them on ballotpedia: 

https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page 

You should also feel free to make purely partisan arguments. In other words, if you member of Congress is a Democrat and you have been assigned to oppose the TPP, you can make an argument that President Trump’s initiatives must be defeated at all costs. 

I have uploaded to Canvas two examples of memos to members of Congress and one strategy memo that I helped write while I was working at Public Citizen. Your policy brief does not have to take this exact form, but these examples should give you some sense of what a policy brief may look like. These materials are written from a perspective of opposition to FTAs. Here are some pro-FTA lobbying materials: 

• https://www.uskoreaconnect.org/by-state

• https://www.uschamber.com/series/the-case-tpp 

• https://www.nam.org/Issues/Trade/TPP/Trans-Pacific-Partnership-(TPP)/ 

• https://www.fb.org/issues/trade/trans-pacific-partnership-tpp-agreement/