The White House and Capitol Hill are singularly focused on passing a tax reform bill — but almost no one in Washington seems to know what the Trump administration will bear down on next.

White House policy initiatives are typically planned months in advance, with congruent strategies for communications and a view toward working them through Congress. But there is little agreement between White House officials and Republican leaders on the Hill about what should follow tax reform.


Over the course of conversations with nearly a dozen senior aides in the White House and on Capitol Hill, a range of possibilities surfaced, from welfare reform to the infrastructure program President Donald Trump touted on the campaign trail to revisiting Obamacare repeal — an effort that has twice frustrated the Trump administration.

The looming vacuum in the Republican agenda underscores how the relative chaos and disorganization of the Trump White House can affect policymaking across Washington. Former administration officials say the situation is virtually unprecedented, and that it is threatening the president’s ability to score legislative victories for the GOP heading into next year’s midterm elections. It may also cost Trump personally once the 2020 reelection campaign begins in earnest about a year from now.

“There is very little in the pipeline, and no obvious next item on the agenda after tax reform except maybe a return to health care,” said Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, a leading conservative policy journal, who works closely with Republicans on Capitol Hill. “Combine that with a president who doesn’t think in terms of policy, and you’ve got no clear next step.”

There are some things the administration needs to do no matter what. White House officials will have to work with Congress to get a budget passed in December. And, thanks to the president’s executive order rolling back President Barack Obama’s work-permit program for young undocumented immigrants, there will have to be a politically explosive debate between now and March about passing a Republican version — which will likely include a showdown over Trump’s long-promised wall between Mexico and the United States.

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The administration’s disorganization is in part a reflection of the president’s own indifference toward many policy issues — but the structure of Trump’s White House staff has in many ways inhibited the sort of long-term policy planning characteristic of previous administrations.

Trump has never appointed a deputy chief of staff for policy solely responsible for developing a legislative strategy and coordinating the messaging around it, for example. Many White House aides have moonlighted in the position while attending to their formal duties. The president’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, laid out early policy targets and was frequently photographed in front of a whiteboard in his office where he kept a handwritten “to do” list of priorities.

Former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus leaned on staff secretary Rob Porter, asking him at various points to take on a policy coordination role in addition to his full-time job — but Priebus himself never laid out a vision for what the policy process should look like.

Several other White House aides have also played a key role in policy development, including domestic policy chief Stephen Miller and deputy chiefs of staff Kirstjen Nielsen and Rick Dearborn, but none is fully responsible for charting administration policy over the long term.

Chief of staff John Kelly, who replaced Priebus in July, has brought some order to the White House, but the retired Marine general doesn’t have a deep background in policymaking — and where domestic policy initiatives are concerned, domestic policy aides say they have felt fettered and complained of order without purpose, according to three people close to the president.

The White House’s relatively weak domestic policy team has been overshadowed by Gary Cohn and his National Economic Council. Cohn, a government neophyte, has built out a staff capable of rivaling the Domestic Policy Council, which typically charts domestic policy, introducing a source of internal rivalry and instability — a key reason Cohn has taken the lead on tax reform, for example, while domestic policy aides have taken a back seat.

“The NEC team is much larger than in previous White Houses, and the DPC team leaves something to be desired,” said a senior White House aide. “In that void, I think Gary’s team has proven much stronger than the DPC team.”

The general disorganization may exact costs on the administration beyond depriving it of legislative victories. It may also make it harder for the White House to retain staff or to attract replacements as administration officials begin to leave next year.

Domestic policy aides who eagerly joined the administration in January to roll back Obamacare and reform the tax code in the first year of the Trump presidency are less clear what staying on for another year might entail. And while health care and tax reform were legislative causes with which conservative policy wonks have long engaged — and even those lukewarm on Trump’s candidacy felt they could contribute to the administration in a policy role — they feel differently about the coming year.

The absence of clear goals for the year ahead has several White House staffers eyeing the exits, according to three people familiar with their plans. The director of the Domestic Policy Council, Andrew Bremberg, who worked on health care before joining the administration, has told associates that he plans to leave the administration in January. Jeremy Katz, a deputy assistant to the president who has served as Cohn’s right hand on economic initiatives, as well as others on the free-trade side of the administration’s debates on economic policy, have told colleagues they are uncertain whether they will stick around beyond tax reform.

Cohn is expected to remain in his job next year if the tax reform push is successful, but he could wind up leaving if Trump embraces anti-free-trade positions, such as a unilateral pullout from NAFTA.

There are signs that both the White House and Congress are preparing to turn to welfare reform in the new year. House Speaker Paul Ryan told donors assembled at a Koch brothers conference in Wichita, Kansas, late last month that Republican lawmakers would tackle welfare after tax reform passes the Congress, according to two people familiar with the remarks — an idea the president mentioned last week, telling reporters that “people are taking advantage of the system."

Ryan’s 2016 “Better Way” agenda laid out a blueprint for welfare reform, but there is no indication that the White House is prepared to sign on to his approach, and, on the staff level, little work has been done at the White House to indicate to lawmakers what the president wants a bill to look like.

Meanwhile, when the tax package moved from the House to the Senate, Cohn said publicly that “we’ll put infrastructure into the House” — a sequence at odds with Ryan’s message to GOP donors.

Senior White House officials did not dispute characterizations of the general confusion surrounding the sequencing of these legislative initiatives, and they said the administration is likely to push welfare reform as well as infrastructure and a health care bill — something that resembles the Graham-Cassidy legislation that stalled in the Senate in September — over the next year.

“It will be all three of them in an order that depends on what the congressional calendar looks like,” said a senior White House aide.

“The president ran on and has pushed a bold, aggressive agenda that is ending business as usual in Washington and putting Americans first,” said deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley. “President Trump has delivered on many of his agenda items in record time — and no arbitrary amount of unnecessary bureaucratic layers will prevent continued successes on behalf of the American people in the new year.”

The dynamic inside Trump’s White House differs from that of previous administrations, where the sequencing of domestic initiatives was carefully planned by White House officials working closely with party leaders on Capitol Hill.

In the George W. Bush administration, the role of deputy chief of staff for policy was held both by Josh Bolten, who went on to become the president’s chief of staff, and by Karl Rove, who served as the mastermind behind the timing and rollout of policy initiatives throughout his time in the White House.

During Bolten’s tenure, Bush administration officials recall, weekly meetings in his West Wing office focused on a calendar he had pinned on his wall that folded out from the current month to reveal the next four months.

“We thought about this stuff very carefully; we had detailed discussions about it,” said a former Bush administration official who participated in the conversations. “The timing of this stuff was carefully thought through, as was the messaging.”

Bush officials say they made mistakes — but not for lack of planning. Rove has said publicly on many occasions that one of the biggest mistakes of the Bush presidency, a plan he fought for at the time, was pushing for changes to Social Security after Bush’s 2004 reelection before tackling immigration reform. Both efforts ultimately failed, a reality that underscores the importance of the sequencing of domestic policy initiatives given the political mood in the country and in the Congress.

“I believe that running the Social Security idea right after the '04 elections was a mistake,” Bush said in his final news conference. “I should have — should have argued for immigration reform.”

Obama administration officials tell a similar story of balancing the president’s priorities with attention to the hard deadlines in Congress and the political mood of the country. “We had clear priority areas that we went into every year and that we refreshed at the six-month point,” said Cecilia Muñoz, who served as director of the Domestic Policy Council for five years during the Obama administration.

With the exception of immigration, Trump didn’t campaign on a detailed policy platform. In office, he has relied on Congress to hammer out the details of legislation and, at times, the order of policy pushes. It was Ryan’s idea, for example, to tackle health care before tax reform, and as the health bill crumbled, the president told associates he regretted agreeing to put Obamacare repeal first.

A more traditional White House, however, would be guiding Congress rather than vice versa. “It’s not unusual for people in Congress to have different perspectives about what’s important and what comes next,” said Muñoz.

But over the Thanksgiving weekend, Trump gave hints that he’s still preoccupied with the victory that eluded him in his first months: a health care overhaul. “Even though Dems want to Obstruct,” he tweeted on Thanksgiving Day, “we will Repeal & Replace right after Tax Cuts!”

