The U.K. and the U.S. are unlikely to be ready to strike a trade deal before 2023

President Joe Biden’s administration is focused on other priorities such as China and investing in domestic programs to bost the U.S. economy, and his legal power to fast-track a trade accord through Congress is due to expire on July 1.

According to one person familiar with the U.K.-U.S. talks, that power is unlikely to be renewed before at least 2023 -- because the midterm elections in 2022 will make trade legislation politically too sensitive to pass.

In London, the government has talked optimistically in public about the prospects of a U.S. agreement but officials are now downplaying the chances of imminent progress.

“The U.K. has always been clear that securing a mutually beneficial and comprehensive deal is more important than reaching agreement by any fixed date,” a spokesperson for the British government’s Department for International Trade said. The U.S. Trade Representative’s office declined to comment.

The slowdown will be disappointing to Johnson and his allies who had been keen to push for a fast deal as an early sign of the U.K.’s success as a global trading nation, newly released from the constraints of European Union membership.

Politically, the long wait for a deal also risks adding to the impression that Biden is keeping his distance from Johnson’s Britain, in contrast to Donald Trump, who publicly championed fast-track trade talks and was an enthusiastic backer of Brexit.

While Britain’s international trade secretary Liz Truss has said the majority of a trade text with the U.S. has been agreed, the most controversial elements of a deal -- like access for U.S. agricultural products such as chlorine-washed chicken or hormone-treated beef -- are yet to be negotiated.

“I have trouble seeing how the Biden administration makes this work in the next two years,” said Simon Lester, the associate director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Washington-based Cato Institute. “I don’t know why they’d want to bring it up with all the other things on their agenda.”

David Henig, director of the U.K. Trade Policy Project at the European Centre for International Political Economy, agreed that the U.S. has other priorities now. “There’s no sense that anything is imminently about to happen,” he said. “This is the year you really want to fix Airbus-Boeing, particularly if you’re going after China.”

When momentum returns to the trade talks, the U.K. is hopeful that the new U.S. administration won’t unpick the chapters that have already been agreed in their five rounds of negotiations, which started in May 2020.