WASHINGTON, D.C. — With the 119th Congress and a new U.S. President taking office, 2025 is set to be another momentous year in politics. As the political voice of the events industry, the Exhibitions & Conferences Alliance (ECA) released its 2025 Public Policy Agenda, outlining its priorities for the coming year.
Trade Show Executive spoke with Tommy Goodwin, ECA’s Vice President, to learn about the important topics and potential progress that ECA has its sights on.
Taxes, Workforce Development and More
Top priorities for ECA in 2025 include enacting pro-growth, pro-impact and pro-workforce development federal tax reform and preventing harmful state and local tax policies that would unfairly target the trade show industry.
With the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act set to expire at the end of this year, lawmakers are looking for ways to offset the cost of extending its polices (which could be around $4.6 trillion). ECA is devoted to preventing these decisions from negatively impacting events and is focused on enhancing competitiveness through growth-focused tax policies.
You can learn more about ECA’s 2025 tax reform priorities here.
Supporting government initiatives to help attract and develop the industry’s future workforce is also on the agenda. Goodwin believes that major workforce development progress could be made this year, citing a study from the Congressional Management Foundation that determined that it takes an average of seven years for a bill to become a law.
“We’re coming up on that period for workforce issues,” Goodwin explained. “There’s been a lot of discussion, there have been hearings, there have been bills … [and] it’s very likely that positive things are going to happen on the workforce front this year.”
According to Goodwin, international travel is more of a wild card, especially where U.S. visa wait times are concerned, though ECA will keep striving to reduce them while modernizing the visa processing system.
“At about a third of embassies and consulates right now, it still takes more than 90 days to get a visa interview,” Goodwin said. “We don’t think it’s unreasonable that every embassy and consulate wait should be under 90 days by the end of the year … That could either be a really easy goal to attain or that could be a harder goal to attain, based on what we’re going to see politically over the next few months.”
While the last Trump Administration imposed travel bans, ECA is ready to oppose any new ones and grow international travel to drive U.S. global competitiveness.
Sustainability is also a less-predictable issue — the Trump Administration rolled back climate progress in its previous iteration, but officials and groups also stepped up in response — though ECA is focused on smart decarbonization for long-term competitive advantage.
Goodwin’s advice? Keep doing your part to reach your sustainability goals and amplify your efforts if you can.
“If you’re doing what you need to be doing as a business, as an organizer [or] as a general service contractor to meet your 2050 goals, you should be accelerating those investments and consistently making them in a way that whatever policy change that happens shouldn’t bother you,” Goodwin said.
A Rocky Beginning
While he anticipates progress, Goodwin expects the first half of 2025 to be slow on the legislation front.
“They’re going to have a really bumpy ramping up … [but] I would expect good things for the industry in the second half of the year,” Goodwin said.
Regardless of how the politics shake out, ECA will continue advocating for the events industry and giving organizers the tools that they need, such as the ECA Advocacy Network and ECA Legislative Action Day, to join the conversation.
“This is probably going to be the most important, and maybe most beneficial, year for the industry in Washington, D.C., for a while,” Goodwin said. “If there are international travel challenges or tariffs, it could be challenging for the industry … but this isn’t the year to be on the sidelines. This is the year to be on the field.”
Reach Tommy Goodwin at tommy.goodwin@exhibitionsconferencesalliance.org
