Deporting 230,000 unauthorized immigrants in Pennsylvania. Cutting health insurance subsidies, leaving as many as 32,000 additional Pennsylvanians unable to afford coverage. Expanding oil and gas drilling in Western Pennsylvania.
Keystone State residents may have been registering their anger at the high price of eggs as they voted to return Donald Trump to the White House. But Trump is claiming a mandate for making all sorts of changes in how government works and overturning the policies of his predecessor, Joe Biden, as he becomes only the second person elected to two non-consecutive terms as president.
After taking office in January, Trump will be in a position to offer proposals that will affect how much you will pay in federal taxes, whether you can write off some of your student loan debt, what your health insurance will cost, and possibly make it harder to get a medication abortion.
Here’s how Pennsylvanians are likely to be affected by the new Trump administration.
Economy
Trump, who won the election primarily due to economic concerns, has promised a “golden age” for the U.S. after he and a Republican-led Congress implement a series of proposals and yet-to-be-fleshed-out plans to lower prices, make homeownership more affordable and boost the U.S. business environment by rewarding domestic manufacturers and punishing economic adversaries overseas, particularly China.
Besides extending the provisions of his 2017 tax law that expire next year, Trump has called for lowering the corporate tax rate even lower to 15% and expanding tax breaks and deductions for American companies.
Republicans say the tax law included key incentives, such as the Opportunity Zone program, to bring investment and jobs to distressed communities like Erie.
One area that remains controversial — including for a Pennsylvania fossil fuel industry that heavily relies on steel — are Trump’s proposed tariffs.
The former president, saying he wants to invest in American companies and American goods, has said he wants to impose an across-the-board tariff of 10% to 20% on all imports, tariffs of up to 60% on Chinese goods and tariffs of up to 200% on cars imported from Mexico.
Both the Center for American Progress and the Tax Foundation suggested that the tariffs could cost Americans an extra $4,000 a year as they are passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices.
In a June letter, 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists said that Trump’s economic proposals, including his tariffs, would “reignite’’ inflation.
— Benjamin Kail
Education
Trump has vowed to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, remove protections for transgender students in K-12 schools, and end Mr. Biden’s effort to forgive college loans.
Republicans for years have promised to kill the Cabinet department created in 1979, but Trump’s election has given more life to those efforts. Trump also questioned the department’s efforts to promote racial equity and protect the rights of transgender students.
Trump’s pledge to do away with the education department is unlikely to happen. He would need congressional approval to eliminate the department, including 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster.
But if he should succeed, there no longer would be a member of the Cabinet solely focused on education issues.
The department also manages $1.6 trillion in federal student loans, and it is unclear how that program would work if the agency is abolished.
Trump has criticized Mr. Biden’s student loan forgiveness programs, calling them “a total catastrophe.” Experts told NBC News they expected the new president to end them.
The program so far has reduced the student loan debt for 44,150 Pennsylvanians, according to the Education Department.
Policy surrounding transgender students could change, too.
In May, Trump said he would reverse sweeping changes to Title IX, a 1972 U.S. law that prohibits sex-based discrimination at schools receiving federal funding. The changes were made this year by the Biden administration to cover discrimination on sexual orientation and gender identity for the first time.
And Trump could expand the use of taxpayer-funded school vouchers for tuition at parochial and private schools. His support for vouchers, along with Republican control of Congress, could mean a taxpayer-financed program to cover private school tuition.
Federal officials could withhold funding from states not providing funds for parents to send their children to religious or other nonpublic schools, or they could begin programs that provide federal tax credits for private-school tuition or expand the use of tax-free education savings accounts like those now used for college costs.
Sharon Sedlar, founder and president of Pittsburgh-based Pennsylvania Families for Education Choice, said she was “encouraged” by Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail. “I would hope there would be pro-school choice policies,” she said.
— Megan Tomasic
Energy
Most regulations that govern oil and gas development in Pennsylvania are decided at the state (environmental) and local (zoning) levels, but federal actions can nudge the pace of that development.
For example, Appalachian producers long have pushed for quicker federal approvals of new pipelines, saying that being able to carry their gas to better-priced markets will compel them to produce more energy.
The industry also has urged Trump to reverse Mr. Biden’s moratorium on building new natural gas export facilities.
“We’re hopeful that President Trump lifts the pause on day one,” said Mike Sommers, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s trade group.
The U.S. exports more liquefied natural gas, or LNG, than any other country, shipping about 11% of its total gas production through the eight export terminals currently in operation.
LNG exports not only fetch higher prices than domestically consumed gas, but they also unlock large markets for the abundant supply of fracked gas that has kept natural gas prices low in the U.S.
This puts large manufacturers and industrial consumers of natural gas at odds with the oil and gas industry –– if more gas is exported, domestic prices will rise, they said.
Trump and API, though, talk of global “energy dominance” as both an economic and political strategy. At a dinner with oil executives in May, Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” asked for $1 billion in campaign contributions as he promised to end the LNG export moratorium, increase offshore drilling, and roll back regulations and scale back incentives to encourage car buyers to purchase electric vehicles rather gasoline-powered ones, the Washington Post reported.
Last week, the industry trade group sent a letter to the president-elect outlining its five-point wish list for the new administration. Along with lifting the LNG moratorium, the document calls for speeding up and refining environmental reviews for pipeline projects and export facilities, and limiting opponents’ ability to delay construction through lawsuits.
API also urged Trump to drop the Environmental Protection Agency’s new fee on methane emissions. The EPA rule assesses a penalty of $900 per metric ton of emissions above a certain threshold for large oil and gas facilities starting this year and moving up to $1,500 per ton in 2026 and afterwards.
The fee, approved by Congress along party lines in 2022 as part of Biden’s climate change and health care law, was designed to encourage companies to stop leaks of the potent greenhouse gas.
But API said it would raise for producers who already are trying to reduce waste.
“We look forward to working with the new administration and Congress on repealing the regulation as quickly as possible,” Mr. Sommers said.
— Anya Litvak
Health care
The last time they were in control of the White House and Congress, Trump and House and Senate Republicans sought to repeal the Affordable Care Act, an action that would have left as many as 32 million more Americans without health insurance.
Their effort crashed and burned on the Senate floor when Arizona Republican John McCain voted no. Outrage over the GOP efforts led to the party losing its House majority in the next election.
The health program has only grown in popularity since then, with 62% of U.S. adults viewing the ACA favorably and just 37% viewing it negatively according to KFF, a health policy research and news organization. That’s the highest it’s ever been.
Still, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., promised “massive reform” and Trump said during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that he had “concepts of a plan.”
But do Republicans really want to relitigate the ACA?
“It will be really interesting to see if the political environment has shifted,” said Cynthia Cox, a vice president and ACA expert at KFF.
Immediately, though, Congress needs to decide whether to extend the increased subsidies enacted under the Biden administration, which lowered the cost of insurance coverage.
Those subsidies, actually premium tax credits, contributed to a 31% increase in Pennsylvanians receiving insurance through the state’s marketplace from 2020 to 2024. The number increased from 332,000 to 435,000.
Without those subsidies, premiums would rise by an average of 81%, according to the Pennsylvania Health Insurance Exchange Authority, which oversees the state’s Pennie marketplace under the Affordable Care Act.
A Pennsylvania family of four making $126,000 a year would see premiums rise by almost two-thirds, from $10,710 to $17,687, if Congress does not renew the subsidies, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive research group.
In addition, 32,000 Pennsylvanians would lose health insurance and 69,000 fewer people would receive the extra help if the current program was allowed to expire, according to the Urban Institute.
— Jonathan D. Salant
Immigration
Trump has promised to deport the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants now in the U.S. — including 230,000 in Pennsylvania — saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
“If you are in this country illegally in six months, pack your bags, because you’re going home,” Vice President-elect JD Vance said in September.
The American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration group, said that deporting them all, plus 2.3 million additional migrants who crossed the border without legal status from January 2023 to April 2024 and were released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, would cost almost $968 billion over a decade.
Besides those costs, expelling immigrants would have other economic costs. The Brookings Institution reported that unauthorized immigrants take jobs that Americans and legal migrants don’t want. While just 2% of legal immigrants and 1% of U.S.-born employees work as housekeepers, construction laborers or cooks, almost 6% of unauthorized immigrants work in those fields, the research group said.
And deporting them would reduce the demand for goods and services, meaning businesses such as car dealerships, supermarkets and beauty parlors would need to employ fewer workers to handle fewer customers, the group said.
Unauthorized immigrants pay $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes — with more than a third of that, $33.9 billion, taken out of their paychecks to pay for Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance programs for which they are ineligible and from which they cannot benefit, according to the progressive Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
In Pennsylvania, unauthorized immigrants pay $523.1 million in state and local taxes, and that amount would rise to $667 million if they are allowed to remain in the U.S. legally, the group said.
— Jonathan D. Salant
Infrastructure
A second Trump presidency could affect future infrastructure projects, like roads, bridges, public transportation and other long-term initiatives.
Allegheny County has seen significant investments in recent years, thanks in part to the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by Congress and signed by Mr. Biden in November 2021.
Last June, federal officials joined state, county, and city partners in Pittsburgh to announce $150 million in federal funds for a $291 million bus rapid transit system in the city. Last January, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg joined federal, county and state leaders in Swissvale to highlight a $142 million federal grant for various roadway and infrastructure improvements in the region.
Federal funds also will be used to repair three major bridges in Pittsburgh.
During his first term, Trump talked about having an “infrastructure week” so often that it became a running joke. After Mr. Biden succeeded in enacting a bipartisan bill, Trump encouraged Republicans to run primaries against the House GOP members who voted for it.
Some experts said Trump was unlikely to alter the bipartisanship infrastructure law, because the projects it funds are popular in Republican areas. The law to date has provided $570 billion in funding for more than 66,000 projects across the country, according to Mr. Buttigieg, who marked the third anniversary of the measure on Thursday.
Trump could, however, attempt to make cuts to Mr. Biden’s climate change and health care law, passed solely with Democratic votes. Trump has consistently criticized Mr. Biden’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’ support of climate and green energy policies.
Laura Zinski, CEO of the Mon Valley Initiative, said federal infrastructure funding is an important part of spurring economic development in communities, including helping small businesses, building houses, or revitalizing main streets.
Ms. Zinski said she was concerned about federal funds being cut in the coming years, including community development block grants that fund housing and social services. Trump sought to eliminate that program during his first term but Congress overruled him.
“So the federal money is really important,” she said. “If that all gets tromped on, thrown into the wind, then we really only are going to have ourselves to rely on.”
— Steve Bohnel
Reproductive rights
Trump has said he would not sign legislation to ban abortion, but there are plenty of ways he can restrict the procedure, even in states that protect abortion rights in their constitutions.
The new president or his attorney general could reinterpret the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era law that hasn’t been enforced for decades, to prevent shipping medications that induce abortion.
The act bans the mailing of “lascivious” and “obscene” materials, including information about abortion and contraception, as well as needed supplies. Medication abortions accounted for 63% of all abortions in the U.S. last year, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.
Trump‘s new Food and Drug Administration commissioner could direct the agency to revisit its approval of the abortion pill mifepristone or backtrack on the agency’s efforts that made the drug easier to obtain.
Or his attorney general could decline to challenge lawsuits against mifepristone brought by Republican-controlled states, or decline to appeal the next time a judge overturned the FDA’s current approval of the drug.
What also worries experts is that new state restrictions on abortion have made it harder for medical professionals to help women when their pregnancies develop complications.
Despite Trump’s promises, Greer Donley, associate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, specializing in abortion, said she has “no doubt” that Trump would sign a national abortion ban if it reached his desk.
Such a national ban could overrule states that allow abortion, such as Pennsylvania, where Gov. Josh Shapiro has vowed to protect reproductive rights.
— Hanna Webster
Taxes
Many provisions of Trump’s tax law expire next year, and the incoming president and congressional Republicans want to renew them, even though it would increase the federal deficit by an estimated $4 trillion over 10 years, according to the Tax Foundation, a research group whose board includes the chief sponsor of the tax law, former U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas.
Those provisions include a higher standard deduction, lower tax rates, an increased Child Tax Credit, and a cut in the estate tax paid only by multimillionaires.
If the entire law is extended, the richest 5% of American households would receive 45% of the benefits, according to the Tax Policy Center, a research group. Close to two-thirds of the benefits — 64% — would go to the top 20% of earners.
U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, chair of the House tax subcommittee, said lawmakers already are working on new legislation, calling the original bill “absolutely incredible.
“We have to pretty much go along the path that we’re going because it was so successful,” said Mr. Kelly, R-Butler. “We have a whole blueprint to follow. Now we just have to look at how we can make it better and how we can make it work.”
Others disagreed with Mr. Kelly’s assessment of the law’s impact.
“There is no evidence that the 2017 tax law has made a substantial contribution to investment or longer-term economic growth,” economist and professor Jason Furman, who chaired President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told the House Ways and Means Committee in February 2020. “In fact, business investment growth has slowed to nearly a halt while economic growth has been propped up by increases in government spending.
Trump also has said he wants to eliminate the existing law’s $10,000 cap on deducting state and local taxes, as well as end taxes on tips and Social Security benefits, and allow car buyers to deduct the interest on automobile loans.
— Jonathan D. Salant
First Published: November 17, 2024, 10:30 a.m.
Updated: November 18, 2024, 8:20 p.m.
