--- title: 4 Things Donald Trump Wants to Get Done in 2018 description: These are Trump's major domestic priorities for reform in 2018. canonical: https://time.com/5084907/donald-trump-2018-calendar/ author: Tessa Berenson article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-01-03T16:21:46.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-12T08:44:07.065Z article:section: Politics og:title: 4 Things President Trump Wants to Accomplish in 2018 og:description: The White House unveiled its top legislative priorities. og:url: https://time.com/5084907/donald-trump-2018-calendar/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0bf34acd3402b6b2/6988f6c2cf40a829cec4ac78/gettyimages-897246490.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3000 og:image:height: 1688 og:image:alt: Donald Trump Signs Tax Reform And Jobs Bill Into Law At The White House og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 4 Things President Trump Wants to Accomplish in 2018 twitter:description: The White House unveiled its top legislative priorities. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0bf34acd3402b6b2/6988f6c2cf40a829cec4ac78/gettyimages-897246490.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 4 Things President Trump Wants to Accomplish in 2018 > Sponsored content. 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It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, twice a week. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3/newsletters?i=a3eff077-717d-4f7f-bc3c-937d750a23ef&cr=time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Sarah Sanders: White House's Priorities for 2018 [Watch (HLS stream): Sarah Sanders: White House's Priorities for 2018](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/8s8BWzvp.m3u8) (1:42)  _Published 2018-01-02. Sarah Sanders: WH's Priorities for 2018_  by [Tessa Berenson](https://time.com/author/tessa-berenson/)  ## Tessa Berenson Jan 3, 2018 4:21 PM UTC  by [Tessa Berenson](https://time.com/author/tessa-berenson/)  ## Tessa Berenson Jan 3, 2018 4:21 PM UTC President Trump notched a major legislative win at the end of 2017, delivering the [tax reform package](http://time.com/5077411/donald-trump-signs-tax-bill/) he’d promised as a “Christmas gift” to the country. The White House now faces 2018 hoping to channel that momentum into a bold list of domestic priorities for the New Year, including revisiting two failures from his first year in office. White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Trump’s major domestic priorities for reform in 2018 are health care, infrastructure, welfare and immigration. “The president was elected because of his ambitious agenda and his desire to get a lot of things done,” Sanders said in a press briefing on Tuesday, calling those four items “top priorities for the Administration this year.” But the White House faces strong headwinds to achieving any of these goals. While Republicans still maintain a slim majority in Congress, they’ll [need cooperation from Democrats](http://time.com/5084067/congress-shutdown-daca-chip/) to pass any major pieces of legislation — a fraught proposition, at best. And Republicans have some time pressure to deliver wins before the midterm elections this year. Here’s a look at Trump’s major goals for 2018. ## **Health care** On repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, Trump has already claimed a win. “When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means Obamacare is being repealed,” [he said](http://time.com/5074051/president-trump-tax-reform-obamacare/) in a Cabinet meeting in December after Congress approved the tax bill. “We have essentially repealed Obamacare, and we will come up with something that will be much better.” The tax plan repeals the individual mandate — a key part of Obamacare that penalizes people without health insurance — beginning in 2019\. It’s not true to say that the tax bill repeals the health care law, which congressional Republicans have repeatedly tried and failed to do. Experts say Republicans’ previous inability to repeal the full law probably presages a failure again this year. “I don’t see anything that’s changed in terms of the lack of support in the Senate,” says Gerald Kominski, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “I think that it is fruitless to continue to bang your head against the wall if you are not going to get the outcome that you want.” But Trump is correct that in certain ways he’s already hobbled the ACA, even if he fell short of an outright repeal. “Their policies to date are destabilizing and damaging the ACA marketplace,” says Kominski. Scrapping the individual mandate, he says, already represents “significant damage” to the law. ## **Infrastructure** Infrastructure is another one of Trump’s campaign promises. Trump has long dangled a promise of $1 trillion in infrastructure spending, and his Administration is expected to unveil its plan in January. But while the tax bill moved forward on Trump’s ambition to kneecap that Affordable Care Act, it could provide a setback here. The tax bill increases the deficit by more than $1 trillion, which makes a massive spending package trickier to wrangle financially and a harder sell for Republicans politically. “In the current environment that’s going to lead to a lot of skepticism, simply because they’ve been talking about tax cuts and entitlement reform. And then to say we’re going to turn around and have major spending on infrastructure reform, I don’t know how they situate that,” says Alan Auerbach, director of the Robert D. Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance at Berkeley. **“**There’s not any magic, it has to be real money, and they \[made\] that real money a lot less available.” The Administration had hoped that an infrastructure package could be a bipartisan win. “I really believe infrastructure can be bipartisan,” Trump [said in December](http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/27/politics/president-donald-trump-infrastructure-agenda-2018/index.html). “People want it, Republicans and Democrats.” But again, tax reform may have made this more difficult to come by, with the party-lines vote pushing an already-strained sense of bipartisanship in Congress [to the breaking point](http://time.com/5072678/gop-tax-reform-bipartisan/). ## **Welfare** Trump is expected to roll out an executive order [mandating a review of federal safety net programs](https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/11/trump-welfare-reform-safety-net-288623) as soon as January. The Administration could include programs like food stamps, Medicaid and housing benefits in its targets for reform. “Looking at any of these programs one at a time doesn’t tell you anything about the welfare system, in fact, it severely misleads you,” says Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “I expect \[the Trump Administration\] to present the welfare \[plan\] and discuss the welfare system holistically.” In this holistic view of welfare reform, Rector expects, the Administration could promote principles such as work requirements, removing marriage penalties from benefits, paying programs for outcomes rather than services provided and moving the cost burden of welfare programs more to the states. But there are ideological and political divisions even among congressional Republicans on changing the welfare system, and to significantly restructure it, the party would need to unite its most moderate and conservative members. That’s a tall order, especially when an inability to do just that helped sink hopes of health care reform in 2017\. And the polling on Medicaid and Social Security demonstrates why changing such programs is notoriously difficult: in April 2017, just 12% of U.S. adults said they wanted cuts to Medicaid spending, according to a [survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation](https://www.kff.org/health-reform/press-release/poll-majority-opposes-hard-ball-negotiating-tactics-to-replace-the-affordable-care-act-but-republicans-support-it/). In a [2017 Pew survey](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/26/few-americans-support-cuts-to-most-government-programs-including-medicaid/), 86% of Republicans and 95% of Democrats said they would like to maintain or increase spending for Social Security. ## **Immigration** Immigration is one of Trump’s signature issues, and it remains at the forefront of his domestic agenda in his second year. Within the first days of 2018, Trump will meet with Congressional leaders to discuss an immigration deal. He predicted on Twitter that “DACA activists and Hispanics will go hard against Dems, will start “falling in love” with Republicans and their President!” > [](https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948211438472089600) In any deal, Trump has said he wants his campaign-promise border wall, as well as an end to chain migration and the U.S. visa lottery system. Democrats [have said they will push Trump](http://time.com/5084283/defend-daca-immigration-trump-democrats/) hard to protect the Dreamers, and insist that any funding for a border wall is unacceptable. ## Transcript Let me ask you about some agenda items, then I'll follow up with a question about the budget. [ LAUGH ] Infrastructure, welfare reform, border security. Which of these is the primary focus in the early stages of 2018? Or is this a buckshot approach and you're simply gonna go for them all and see which one you can stick the landing on first? Look, the President was elected because of his ambitious agenda and his desire to get a lot of things done. We're gonna focus on that. The things that you listed are certainly gonna be big priorities for us in 2018. A lot of the meetings That the President has this week with leadership we'll help determine what the best strategy is on each of those individual areas, but those are certainly welfare reform, infrastructure. Responsible immigration reform and healthcare will all be top priorities for the administration this year. Speaking of the meetings, both tomorrow and even coming up this weekend. For the American people who might be wondering so what happens in a meeting like this? Can you sort of lay out what the expectation might be from the President's point of view. I think it would be to talk about, again, the strategy of the best way to accomplish maximum success in all of those areas that we've outlined. Obviously, the budget is first and foremost, one of the biggest priorities right now, and certainly the big priority in the immediate term. The President wants a two year budget deal that provides realistic budget caps And provide certainty for our national security, that's our biggest and number one priority. And that will be the focus front and center of the conversations that are taking place this week. And then beyond that it will be talking about those four other priorities that I'll outline and what the strategy to get maximum success on those would look like. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5084907/donald-trump-2018-calendar/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5084907/donald-trump-2018-calendar/"},"headline":"4 Things President Trump Wants to Accomplish in 2018","datePublished":"2018-01-03T16:21:46.000Z","dateModified":"2026-10-12T08:44:07.065Z","description":"These are Trump's major domestic priorities for reform in 2018.","url":"https://time.com/5084907/donald-trump-2018-calendar/","keywords":["White House","Health Care","Congress","Medicare","welfare","Infrastructure","Immigration","Medicaid","Social Security","Donald Trump"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0bf34acd3402b6b2/6988f6c2cf40a829cec4ac78/gettyimages-897246490.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Tessa Berenson","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/tessa-berenson/"}],"articleSection":"Politics","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0bf34acd3402b6b2/6988f6c2cf40a829cec4ac78/gettyimages-897246490.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Donald Trump Signs Tax Reform And Jobs Bill Into Law At The White House","caption":"Donald Trump Signs Tax Reform And Jobs Bill Into Law At The White House","creditText":"Chip Somodevilla—Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/politics/","name":"Politics"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/white-house/","name":"White House"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/5084907/donald-trump-2018-calendar/","name":"4 Things President Trump Wants to Accomplish in 2018"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Sarah Sanders: White House's Priorities for 2018","description":"Sarah Sanders: WH's Priorities for 2018","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/8s8BWzvp/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2018-01-02T20:18:01.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/8s8BWzvp.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/5084907/donald-trump-2018-calendar/","duration":"PT1M42S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/5084907/donald-trump-2018-calendar/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```