WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump is hailing the Republican tax overhaul law during a pitch to rural America at a meeting of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Trump notes in Nashville, Tennessee, that he’s the first president to address the group in a quarter-century.

He says tax cuts and the doubling of the threshold for the estate tax will help farmers.

Trump says “most family farms will be spared” now from the “deeply unfair estate tax,” adding that the GOP law will help farmers “keep your farms in the family.”

The president is also generating applause with his calls for the American flag and the national anthem to be “respected.” Trump was traveling to Atlanta later Monday for the College Football Playoff National Championship.

Two US Democratic politicians asked a government watchdog on Monday to scrutinise implementation of Trump’s tax law, warning that the administration could use new tax guidelines to create the appearance of a large middle-class tax cut ahead of the 2018 mid-term elections.

In a letter to US Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Richard Neal said they were concerned that the US Treasury could be pressured to adopt tax withholding tables that take too little federal tax out of employee paychecks to make good on White House predictions of a middle-class windfall.

Such a move would inflate after-tax pay this year but leave workers to pay sizeable tax bills in 2019 when they file their 2018 federal tax returns, the lawmakers said.

Wyden and Neal, the top Democrats on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee and House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, asked that the watchdog Government Accountability Office review new Internal Revenue Service withholding tables to “assure Congress and the American public that there is no political influence.”

Treasury, IRS and GAO officials had no immediate comment.

Representative Kevin Brady, Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a main author of the Republican tax overhaul, dismissed the concerns expressed by Wyden and Neal.

“There’s never been any question about the IRS’s timely, accurate withholding tables. Nor should there be today,” Brady told reporters.

Agencies