White House officials outlined what one of them called an“aggressive” timetable Monday for getting a tax overhaul in placebefore the end of the year.

A top White House legislative aide said the plan for a tax coderewrite is to start hearings and a markup of the bill after LaborDay so a version can get through the House in October and theSenate in November. He also said a 2018 budget resolution—the firststep to get a tax bill passed without Democratic support—would beagreed upon in September or October.

“So that, I think, is an aggressive schedule, but that is ourtimetable,” White House legislative affairs chief Marc Short saidat a tax event in Washington sponsored by Americans forProsperity, a group backed by billionaire industrialistsCharles and David Koch.

National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn repeated themessage, saying that the administration and congressional lawmakerswere in a “heavy drive toward tax reform.” Treasury SecretarySteven Mnuchin said at the AFP event that the plan was to have atax bill “start going through the normal process” beginning onSept. 1.

The White House has said it wants to lower corporate andindividual tax rates, eliminate deductions and simplify the code.Despite the officials' assurances on timing, many obstacles andunanswered questions remain about how to offset cutting tax rateswith new revenue so the tax changes can be permanent undercongressional budget rules.

Short said that the White House probably wouldn't be pushing forso-called full expensing, which would allow companies to fullydeduct their capital spending from income immediately instead ofover years. House Speaker Paul Ryan had pushed for full expensing,along with the controversial border-adjusted tax on imports, in histax blueprint released last June.

“The message is: It may not be perfect for everything we want,but it's going to be really, really good for the economy and a lotbetter than what we have,” Mnuchin said.

A tax overhaul will require a delicate balancing act, and onethat has bedeviled negotiators in the past. A major tax revamphasn't been passed in more than three decades, and the Trumpadministration is under pressure after another legislativeeffort—repealing and replacing the 2010 health-care legislation—hasproduced no results.

Short said the president plans to do more traveling to pitch atax overhaul than he did for the health-care effort. “From a travelperspective, you'll probably see more activity,” he said.

Few details of the planned tax code rewrite have emerged fromweekly, closed-door tax meetings between Trump's advisers andcongressional leaders, leading analysts to fear that any tax-ratecuts may be shallower than many hoped. That would jeopardizeTrump's goal of spurring job creation and economic growth, and dolittle to prevent U.S. companies from shifting their income and taxliabilities offshore to lower-tax countries, economists say.

Negotiators have made “enormous progress” despite being “prettyfar apart” when the effort to rewrite the tax code began during thetransition, Cohn said Monday morning.

Still, he added: “We've got to get a lot done in the next threeto four weeks.”

Inflated Chicken

About 50 protesters demonstrated outside the AFP event whereMnuchin and Short spoke. They were accompanied by large propsincluding an inflated chicken sporting a hairstyle like Trump's—areference to the protesters' saying the president is afraid torelease his tax returns.

Trump has departed from 40 years of tradition for presidents bydeclining to make his returns public. He has said he's under anaudit and won't release the documents until that review hasconcluded. The demonstrators held pre-printed yellow signs withslogans including “Medicaid Not Millionaires” and “No Tax Cuts ForTrump.” They used bullhorns to tell stories about people who couldbe adversely affected by cuts in social programs if they're used tohelp pay for tax changes.

Last week, White House officials and congressional leadersreleased a joint statement outlining their tax principles, with theonly real progress disclosed being that the border-adjusted taxwouldn't be part of negotiations going forward. That signaled avictory for retailers and other import-heavy industries and forgroups backed by the Koch brothers, which opposed the measure.

The border-adjusted tax had helped Ryan and his allies proposelowering the corporate tax rate to 20% from the current 35%. Trumphas called for going even lower—to 15%, a target that may be farharder to achieve.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee,tried to temper expectations on corporate rates when talking toreporters Monday.

“The art of the doable is the threshold right now,” Hatch said.“Anywhere between 15 and 25% would be tremendous.”

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