In a brief letter to lawmakers, Robert Lighthizer, the newly confirmed United States trade representative, said the administration aimed to support economic growth and better-paying jobs through unspecified improvements to Nafta that would modernize the 23-year-old agreement. But the notice — a drastically scaled-back version of a draft the administration circulated this year — promised no major modifications of the sort that the president has hinted he will seek.
Mr. Trump had threatened to withdraw completely from the agreement, only to relent in late April when the leaders of Canada and Mexico, the other parties to the deal, called and asked him to renegotiate instead. Sonny Perdue, his secretary of agriculture, also presented Mr. Trump with a map illustrating the potential negative consequences for American farmers if the deal were shut down...
The move was met with skepticism by organizations that have long pressed for major changes to Nafta and have argued that Mr. Trump had already fallen short of his promises on trade.
“Donald Trump promised that he’d fix Nafta on his first day in office,” Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, an environmental group, said in a statement. “One hundred and nineteen days later, he has managed to send Congress a two-page letter that fails to include any real plan to fix a deal that has undermined environmental protections, eliminated jobs, undercut wages, polluted our air and water, and fueled climate change.”
The page-long letter stood in stark contrast to an eight-page version circulated on Capitol Hill in March, which proposed adding a provision to allow tariffs to be reinstated if a flood of imports threatened to harm a domestic industry. It also said the Trump administration would seek to adjust the agreement’s rules of origin, which specify how much of a product must be made in a Nafta country.
The notice sent on Thursday instead mentioned repeatedly that any changes would be the result of congressional consultation, and it pledged close coordination and “transparency” with lawmakers throughout the renegotiation process. It laid out the framework for the talks in only the most general of terms. The letter was required under a law that mandates that the president give Congress at least 90 days’ notice before opening a trade negotiation.
