Congress is anxious as US-Canada-Mexico trade talks intensify

Politics admin June 19, 2026 0 Comments

Congress is anxious as US-Canada-Mexico trade talks intensify

WASHINGTON — As another round of negotiations to review a North American free-trade deal wraps up in Washington this week, lawmakers are growing more vocal in defense of the deal, and anxious about its future.

President Trump has said he’s not sure whether he will renew the six-year-old United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. While many view the president’s threats as a negotiating tactic, they are still causing concern among members of Congress whose districts depend on the agreement.

The United States and Mexico are negotiating in earnest, trading proposals in Washington this week about cars, agriculture, and other topics. But Canada did not join the negotiations, raising questions about how any changes would be translated to a three-party agreement. The Trump administration has at times threatened to jettison Canada entirely.

Representative Linda T. Sánchez of California, the top Democrat on a House trade panel, said in an interview that she was a “big proponent” of maintaining the trilateral structure of USMCA.

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“I’m concerned that the Trump administration is going to abandon that and do these bilateral, like MOUs, which don’t have the full effect of Congress,” she said, comparing Trump’s trade deals to informal memorandums of understanding.

Trump negotiated USMCA in his first term to revise the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he called one of the worst deals ever. USMCA wrapped in priorities of both Republicans and Democrats, and its “implementation act” passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2020.

Since then, Trump and his advisers have grown more critical of the pact, seeing it as responsible for trade deficits with Canada and Mexico, the United States’ biggest trading partners.

Under the terms of the agreement, the three countries promised to review the deal by July 1. During negotiations in Mexico last month, the United States proposed changes to the pact’s rules for metals, cars, and other goods, including raising the requirement for how much local materials cars need to be made with to be exempt from tariffs.

USMCA requires cars to source 75 percent of their content by value from North America to qualify for tariff-free treatment. The Trump administration would raise that threshold to 82 percent, while requiring 50 percent of a car’s content to come from the United States, people familiar with the proposals said. The United States is also proposing expanding those requirements to new types of car parts and setting new content requirements for other industries, including electronics.

In an interview Thursday, Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, said talks this week with Mexican officials had been positive, and included discussions of how to revive the global electronics supply chain in the United States and Mexico, while keeping the US trade deficit with Mexico down.

“We certainly want more US content, but to the extent we’re going to be importing these other things, we want to have them as close to home as possible,” he said of the electronics industry.

Greer has talked about the importance of keeping parts of USMCA intact, but the president has lately seemed far more critical. In France on Wednesday, Trump said the United States would “do better without” the pact.

“I would rather not have the agreement, but I may sign it,” Trump said. “We do better as a country if we don’t have an agreement.”

USMCA and its predecessor, NAFTA, have always been somewhat divisive politically, but the three countries are carrying out negotiations over USMCA’s future at a sensitive political moment, as midterms loom and Trump’s economy is on the ballot.

While some parties, like the United Automobile Workers union or Florida tomato growers, have intense criticisms of the pact, it has many defenders. The deal’s future is particularly important for states that export farm goods, as well as those on US borders that are economically integrated with Canada or Mexico.

In a hearing this month held by the House Committee on Agriculture, Representative Glenn Thompson a Pennsylvania Republican and the committee’s chair, said the agreement had proved “extremely beneficial” to farmers, ranchers, consumers, “and the economy as a whole.” But he conceded that it had provisions that could be improved.

Democrats are urging changes that they say would benefit workers and the environment. Sánchez led nearly 20 Democrats in a letter urging Greer to negotiate provisions that would target threats to economic security, strengthen workers’ rights and add new environmental protections.

Many Republicans have tried to walk a line of voicing support for USMCA while saying it has room for improvements.

“A renewed USMCA really, I think, can hold our neighbors accountable, and then work for our own ag producers and our manufacturers,” Representative Adrian Smith of Nebraska, the top Republican on a House trade panel, said in an interview. “Right now, our role is to elevate the profile of the policy and the issue itself, given its importance to our economy,” he added.

Smith said he was “not a fan of tariffs” but had come around to some of the Trump administration’s efforts to open up foreign markets to American business. His constituents’ reactions to Trump’s tariffs are “mixed,” he said.

Sidelined from the negotiations, Republican and Democratic lawmakers have penned letter after letter, held briefings with experts and traveled to Mexico City during talks last month to make their priorities heard.

The administration is also sparring with some lawmakers about the role Congress will play in the pact’s approval. Greer said Thursday that he would seek Congress’ approval if the revised pact made changes to US law, but that the changes were more likely to affect Canada and Mexico than the United States.

“We don’t really have to change our laws to get better terms of trade with Canada and Mexico,” he said. “We need Canada and Mexico to change the way that they’re treating our country.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.