House Democrats are bracing for major fights in the coming year as President Trump enters the White House for his second term and Republicans control all levers of power in Washington.
Trump, who was sworn in on Monday, has promised an ambitious legislative agenda, vowing to overhaul policies across the agencies while making bold claims that voters gave him a mandate to push those changes into being.
His proposed agenda touches on virtually every major policy issue governed by Washington — from immigration, energy and health care, to law enforcement, taxes and trade — and Democrats are already girding to protect their favored programs, including a long list of initiatives adopted by President Biden in response to the CCOVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re getting ready for a broad-scale assault,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. “It seems like the whole Trump party has now adopted the ‘flood the zone’ philosophy.”
Here’s where some of the key Democratic players see the biggest battles of 2025 emerging.
Deportations
One of Trump’s most prominent campaign planks was the promise to deport millions of immigrants living in the country without authorization.
“On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out,” Trump said just before the Nov. 3 election.
That policy shift can largely be initiated from the administration unilaterally, but it will be easier said than done. There are roughly 11 million immigrants without permanent legal status in the country, according to the latest federal estimate. And even if Trump focused solely on convicted criminals (almost 436,000, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and those facing criminal charges (almost 227,000), the costs would be massive.
That means Congress, which controls Washington’s spending, will also have a significant role to play in that debate. And Democrats are vowing a drag-out fight — one in which they see the business community as a powerful ally.
“I’m now hearing from a lot of companies that depend on migrant labor,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.), the senior Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, who listed deportations as a top issue on his radar. “So I think the perception that everybody wants people to go is not the case.”
Birthright Citizenship
Raskin said another of Trump’s early promises — the elimination of blanket citizenship rights for everyone born in the United States — will spark another major partisan battle. And Democrats, he said, will have even greater voice in that debate because those rights are enshrined in the Constitution and would almost certainly require an act of Congress to remove them.
“They’ve signaled that they want to abolish birthright citizenship on the first day of the administration — that collides directly with the 14th Amendment,” said Raskin, a former law professor. “So there will be a big fight about that.”
Adopted in 1868, the 14th Amendment granted citizenship and civil rights protections to slaves, and the descendants of slaves, following the Civil War.
Trump and some of his Republican allies in the Capitol say the law has been abused and should not apply to children born of immigrants who lack permanent legal status. Trump told NBC last month that he would have ended birthright citizenship in his first term, but the Covid pandemic stifled the plan.
This year, he signed an order on Day 1 seeking to end birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents who are not lawfully present. The ACLU has sued to challenge the order.
Ukraine
Leaders in both parties have backed billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine since Russia invaded almost three years ago. But Trump, who rolled to victory on a message of “America First” isolationism, has been cold to the idea of continuing that help. And House Republicans appear ready to follow his lead.
The GOP shift became more evident last week when Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) replaced Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), a Russia hawk, with Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.), who has opposed Ukraine aid, at the top of the House Intelligence Committee.
Biden pushed billions of dollars for Kyiv in the final weeks of his tenure. But with no end in sight to the Russia-Ukraine war, Congress is sure to confront the question of whether more aid should be delivered. Democrats have the backing of moderate Republicans in that fight, but with Trump in power they know it won’t be easy.
”There’s a strong bipartisan majority here in the House, and in the Senate, that wants to continue to support Ukraine in the war against Russia,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), the ranking member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. “At least at the starting gate, that’s a … clash with the president-elect.”
ObamaCare subsidies
Trump tried unsuccessfully in his first term to repeal ObamaCare in its entirety. This time around he’s been less clear about his intentions for the program, which has gained in popularity and recently saw enrollment hit a record high of almost 24 million people.
But the insurance subsidies that are central to the program expire at the end of the year, and some key Republicans — including Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee — have suggested those payments should expire.
Those threats are lighting a fire under some top Democrats — including Reps. Frank Pallone (N.J.), senior Democrat on the Energy and Commerce panel, and Richard Neal (Mass.), the ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee — who both have some jurisdiction over the health care debate and are vowing to fight tooth and nail to preserve those funds.
“We’ve got the extension of ACA subsidies,” Neal said. “That’s a big deal.”
Prescription drug prices
Pallone pointed to another battle brewing in the health care space: The partisan disagreement over whether Medicare should have the power to negotiate prescription drug prices on behalf of seniors.
Biden adopted that policy as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022, when Democrats controlled the House and Senate. And as one of his last acts from the White House, Biden announced 15 new drugs that would be subject to those negotiations.
But Republicans, who have long opposed negotiation as an encroachment on private markets, are eying plans to repeal that provision, among a long list of other IRA measures.
“My biggest concern is that I don’t want them to try to repeal the negotiated prices for prescription drugs,” Pallone said. “I don’t want them to eliminate the subsidies for the ACA. And I don’t want to eliminate the climate provisions in the IRA.”
Climate
Pallone is not alone in bracing for big fights over energy and climate provisions passed in the IRA, which sought to encourage a shift away from the country’s reliance on fossil fuels.
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), the newly installed ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee, is also readying for battle to preserve the climate subsidies and other environmental protections.
“The fossil-fuel agenda — across the board, they’re going to just try to do massive giveaways, opening up public lands, rolling back royalty reform,” Huffman said.
“There’s also the environmental laws they’re going to want to dramatically weaken, if not eliminate,” he added. “We will have to fight on that.”
The United States, in recent years, has produced more energy than it consumes. Still, congressional Republicans are vowing to expand oil and gas drilling, to include a reversal of Biden’s recent ban on some offshore drilling, which Trump said he’ll repeal “immediately.”
“We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said earlier this month.
Taxes
The 2017 tax cuts were the defining domestic achievement of Trump’s first term. With those cuts scheduled to expire at the end of the year, the battle over which taxpayers should retain their benefits into 2026 is shaping up to be among the biggest clashes in Washington.
Trump and his GOP allies want to extend all the cuts, to include the lower rates for corporations and wealthy Americans established in 2017. Democrats are fighting instead to preserve the cuts for working-class taxpayers, while allowing the rates to increase for wealthier people.
Neal, as senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, will lead that fight. He said Democrats will also be pressing for two related issues: an expansion of the child tax credit and paid family leave. And he thinks Democrats will have leverage in the debate because of the GOP’s historically thin House majority.
“It’s going to be hard for them with a three vote majority — if that — to pass a tax bill,” he said.
Crypto
Just a few years ago, Trump called cryptocurrencies a “scam.” But that was then.
On the campaign trail, the president emerged as a convert, embracing the industry and vowing to make America “the crypto capital of the planet.”
That shift has sparked the concern of Rep. Maxine Waters (Calif.), the senior Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, who’s predicting the biggest fight on her panel this year will be how — or even whether — Congress should regulate the largely ungoverned industry.
“Many of our members don’t know a lot about crypto, and they’re going to be under a kind of pressure from the crypto industry,” she said.
“Trump is already invested in crypto, and he says he’s going to be the crypto king. But we’ve got to have guardrails. That’s the most important thing,” she continued. “Those of us who understand, we’ve just got to fight very hard to say, ‘We’ve got to have guardrails. It can’t just be the wild, wild west out there.’”
Protect federal employees
Trump’s war with the federal bureaucracy has been a defining feature of his time in Washington.
He’s accused the Justice Department of “weaponizing” its resources to damage him legally while blaming the “deep state” of orchestrating efforts to undermine him politically. A policy blueprint penned by some of his top allies proposes to gut the federal employee pool and replace it with Trump loyalists.
Connolly, the ranking member of Oversight, said he expects to be on the front lines of Democratic efforts to push back against any federal workforce overhaul, especially if it includes punitive policies like relocations.
“He did that in his first term, and it failed,” Connolly said. “Most of the employees involved ended up taking other jobs or quitting, rather than being relocated, and there was a degradation of services as a result.”
Connolly also said there will be a noisy clash if Trump attempts to make good on a proposal to privatize the Postal Service.
“We will certainly, hammer-and-tongs, oppose that,” he said.
