Ryan to unveil GOP agenda as party awaits Trump’s policy plans

(Bloomberg) – Speaker Paul Ryan is set to unveil the first plank of a House Republican legislative plan aimed at carving out an agenda for a party whose presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump, hasn’t offered many detailed policy positions.

Proposals aimed at fighting poverty are the first of six policy areas that Ryan and House leaders are addressing in their “Confident America” project.

The House plan that Ryan is announcing Tuesday includes measures to give states more incentives to get people back to work faster or risk losing matching federal funds; to change how unemployment insurance works; and to give states more flexibility in transitioning welfare programs into block-grant programs.

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Other proposals are aimed at boosting greater retirement savings, including expanding access to 401(k) retirement accounts, making it easier for small businesses to get together and provide such accounts, and changes to the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law that Republicans say would expand access to basic banking.

The recommendations are aimed at building a legislative agenda for Republicans in 2017, but they will also provide a benchmark to evaluate whether Trump’s policy agenda lines up with that of House Republicans. A national security plan is set to be unveiled Thursday.

War on Poverty

In the plan being announced Tuesday, Ryan is putting forward what he calls “a better way to fight poverty,” based on the notion that upward mobility won’t come through more government safety-net spending and programs.

The proposal starts with a basic assertion that Americans today are no better off than when President Lyndon B. Johnson unveiled his “Great Society” program and the “war on poverty” in 1964, a claim many Democrats and others dispute.

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