Created in the 1960s, the trade adjustment program is premised on a political bargain: Freer trade is good for the country, but these gains are sometimes unevenly distributed. So TAA provides temporary assistance to workers, mostly in manufacturing, who have been displaced because of open global markets. Recipients get up to two years of cash "income support" and are enrolled full-time in TAA-approved job retraining.

The program has never worked very well -- and for predictable reasons. It isn't easy to distinguish between workers laid off due to foreign competition, and those who lose jobs due to new technology, shifting consumer demand, or recession. The Labor Department has little discretion under TAA; it uses certain economic triggers, like shifts in imports, to certify "worker groups" that can demonstrate adverse effects from import competition. The result is that the benefits often help the wrong workers.

The "retraining" also may or may not be useful, depending on the skills required to get a new job in any given region. And in any case, extending cash benefits for as long as two years can reduce the incentive for workers to go back to work, which is the best form of retraining.

None of this seems to matter to House Democrats, who are scheduled to consider a bill today that will ignore these flaws, and multiply them. In particular, they want to sever trade assistance from job loss due to trade. Under the House bill, trade assistance would expand well beyond the manufacturing industries affected by imports and would apply to service industries affected by "outsourcing," and even to public employees. The bill also requires the Labor Department to automatically make industry-wide TAA determinations that would mean all job losses across an entire industry would qualify for benefits.

In essence, the bill would create a second program of jobless benefits parallel to the federal-state Unemployment Insurance that workers are currently eligible for. And it increases the duration of TAA cash payments to three years, from two, which means creating an even longer-term disincentive to get a new job. If you want to know why so many countries in Europe have a jobless rate well above 's, this kind of policy is the reason. When you subsidize people not to work, you get more non-workers.

Freer trade does hurt some Americans more than others in the short term, and Congress could ease this anxiety by making pensions more portable, and deregulating the health insurance market to let workers carry policies from job to job. As a political matter, some trade assistance might even be a price worth paying for more trade expansion. Yet Democrats are sitting on at least four bilateral trade deals, with only the and pacts likely to move any time soon. There's no guarantee that expanded trade assistance will lead to more votes for these trade pacts. Big Labor will oppose them even if TAA covered every job layoff in -- which it soon might.

TAA currently costs about $1 billion a year, and no one really knows how much more the expansion will run up. The Bush Administration is threatening a veto, while supporting reforms to make the program more flexible to quickly move dislocated workers back into the workforce. The Democratic bill, by contrast, is one more federal entitlement wrapped in the false promise that Americans can shelter themselves from business competition.

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