Budget Reconciliation: Tracking the 2025 Trump Tax Cuts
President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law on July 4, 2025.
18 min readLearn more about budget reconciliation and explore our research and analysis of the latest budget reconciliation tax proposals. Our experts explain what budget reconciliation is, how it works, and the role that politics will play in it for the 119th Congress as well as President Trump‘s policy agenda. You can also launch our Reconciliation Tracker
President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law on July 4, 2025.
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Our experts explain how this major tax legislation may affect you and how policymakers can better improve the tax code.
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We estimate the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would increase long-run GDP by 1.2 percent and reduce federal tax revenue by $5 trillion over the next decade on a conventional basis.
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The One Big Beautiful Bill Act makes many of the individual tax cuts and reforms of the TCJA permanent. It improves upon the TCJA by making expensing for R&D and equipment permanent. However, for the most part, it does not include further structural reforms, and instead introduces many new, narrow tax breaks to the code, adding complexity and raising revenue costs.
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Congress is racing to pass the One Big Beautiful Tax Bill before the July 4 deadline. In this episode, Kyle Hulehan and Erica York break down what just happened over the weekend, what’s actually in the bill, and what comes next as the House and Senate try to reconcile their differences.
Our preliminary analysis finds the tax provisions increase long-run GDP by 0.8 percent and reduce federal tax revenue by $4.0 trillion from 2025 through 2034 on a conventional basis before added interest costs.
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As the current tax package stands, the House’s use of temporary policy is leaving most of the economic growth opportunities on the table.
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At the end of 2025, the individual tax provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) expire all at once. Without congressional action, most taxpayers will see a notable tax increase relative to current policy in 2026.
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Unless Congress acts, Americans are in for a tax hike in 2026.
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As lawmakers work through the reconciliation process, permanently enacting improvements to deductions for capital investment and research and development (R&D) costs will create an economically powerful package.
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If Congress allows the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) to expire as scheduled, most aspects of the individual income tax would undergo substantial changes, resulting in more than 62 percent of tax filers experiencing tax increases in 2026.
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Permanently extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would boost long-run economic output by 1.1 percent, the capital stock by 0.7 percent, wages by 0.5 percent, and hours worked by 847,000 full-time equivalent jobs.
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Tax simplification has two aspects. The first is a code without a mess of targeted provisions for various social policy goals. The second is a code with provisions that are simple and easy to comply with. The bill succeeds at the first, but fails at the second.
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Tax legislation in 2025 may have good reason to address international corporate income taxes, because of scheduled changes slated to go into effect or because of international developments like the Pillar Two agreement.
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As Republicans look for ways to offset the budgetary cost of extending the expiring provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and potentially enacting other tax cuts, the latest estimates indicate several trillion dollars could be raised by reducing tax credits and other preferences in the tax code.
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If lawmakers are serious about pro-growth policies and fiscal responsibility, they will need to put policies forward that achieve those goals. Simply adjusting the baseline doesn’t reduce actual deficits in the coming years.
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Lawmakers should prioritize pro-growth tax policies and use the least economically damaging offsets to make the legislation fiscally responsible. If lawmakers choose to use C-SALT, they should carefully consider the economic trade-off with permanent, pro-growth tax cuts that support investment and innovation in the US.
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Fiscal pressures are likely to weigh heavily on lawmakers as they craft a tax reform package. That increased pressure could result in well-designed tax reform that prioritizes economic growth, simplicity, and stability, or it could encourage budget gimmicks and economically harmful offsets. Lawmakers should avoid the latter.
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What happens to your taxes when the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expires on January 1, 2026? In this episode, we explore the potential tax hikes facing millions of Americans and the debate over measuring the budgetary impacts of extending tax cuts.
In a perilous economic and fiscal environment, with instability created by Trump’s trade war and publicly held debt on track to surpass the highest levels ever recorded within five years, a lot rides on how Republicans navigate tax and spending reforms in reconciliation.
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While capping C-SALT has superficial appeal in perceived parity with personal limits, it rests on flawed assumptions about the nature of individual and corporate income taxes.
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The House Budget Committee has released a budget resolution that specifies large reductions in both taxes and spending over the next decade, paving the way to extend the expiring provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and potentially cut other taxes.
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The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was the largest corporate tax reform in a generation, lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, temporarily allowing full expensing for short-lived assets (referred to as bonus depreciation), and overhauling the international tax code.
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Pro-growth tax reform that does not add to the deficit will require tough choices, but whether to raise the corporate tax rate is not one of them. If lawmakers want to craft fiscally responsible and pro-growth tax reform, a higher corporate tax rate simply does not fit into the puzzle.
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What will the future of tax policy look like? In this episode, we dive into the critical challenges and opportunities looming on the horizon, especially with major tax cuts set to expire, which could increase taxes for 62 percent of filers.
Republican policymakers in Congress are considering options to raise revenue as part of their expected legislative package in 2025. One such option involves raising the tax rate on university endowments first put in place as part of the TCJA in 2017.
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Tax policy is almost always a balancing act between the tax rate – how much someone pays – and the tax base – who or what is being taxed.
One has to wonder how stable or sustainable the Democrats’ spending program can be if it must rely so heavily on the taxes paid by such a small number of taxpayers as in the top 1 percent.
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Reducing the tax gap is a good idea, but the reporting requirements for financial institutions could be better-targeted at the problem at hand.
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President Biden expanded and fundamentally changed the Child Tax Credit (CTC) for one year in the American Rescue Plan (ARP) passed in March 2021. Policymakers are now deciding the future of the expansion as part of the proposed reconciliation package, but a wide range of estimates for the effects of a permanent expansion is confusing the debate.
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Under the House Ways and Means plan to raise taxes on corporations and individuals, the integrated tax rate on corporate income would rise to the third highest in the OECD. To reduce this burden, policymakers could explore integrating the individual and corporate tax systems.
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In an effort to raise roughly $100 billion, the House proposal would double cigarette taxes and increase all other tobacco and nicotine taxes to comparable rates—a strategy with severe unintended consequences.
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Tax Foundation testimony at the Joint Economic Committee hearing on the revenue provisions in the Build Back Better Act and related analysis on their estimated impact.
Using Tax Foundation’s Multinational Tax Model, we estimate the effective tax rates on controlled foreign corporation (CFC) profits under current law and under each of the proposed plans for business tax hikes.
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If the spending in the $3.5 trillion budget resolution were financed entirely from tax increases, it would rival as a share of GDP the tax increases used to finance World War II and the Korean War.
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Federal policy is hard. Federal health care policy during reconciliation while governing with razor-thin margins is really, really hard. We break down the debate on Capitol Hill over drug pricing and what the tradeoffs would be of having the federal government set prescription drug prices.
One of the Senate’s proposals to pay for the Build Back Better Act is a federal excise tax on virgin plastics, which are plastics that are not reprocessed or recovered.
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A carbon tax would be a less economically harmful pay-for than either personal or corporate income tax hikes and a more efficient way to reduce carbon emissions than green energy tax credits, but would come with other trade-offs.
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As Congress considers President Biden’s proposal to tax unrealized capital gains at death, the history of previous efforts suggests it faces a perilous road ahead. Lawmakers must resolve tricky design and implementation details that derailed past attempts to change how capital gains are treated when assets are passed from one generation to the next.
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Under the House Ways and Means tax plan, the United States would tax corporate income at the third-highest integrated tax rate among rich nations, averaging 56.6 percent.
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Over the course of the last year, it has become clear that Democratic lawmakers want to change U.S. international tax rules. However, as proposals have surfaced in recent weeks, there are clear divides among various proposals.
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The White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA)’s recent report estimates the average federal individual income tax rate for the top 400 wealthiest households in the U.S to be 8.2 percent, lower than typically estimated for top earners.
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We discuss where the reconciliation package on Capitol Hill stands and talk through recent Tax Foundation modeling, which found that the plan may not have the economic boost its proponents have claimed.
The latest version of the Biden Build Back Better agenda, released last week by the House Ways and Means committee, is dense, with too many provisions to flesh out completely. Here’s a rundown of the good, the bad, and the ugly of it.
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The potential federal tax increase of over 1,600 percent on dipping tobacco as a result of the House Democrats’ proposal could result in state taxes and retail prices increasing by more than 50 percent in certain states.
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As Congress considers several tax proposals designed to raise taxes on high-income earners, it’s worth considering the distribution of the existing tax code.
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Under the House Democrats’ reconciliation plan, the top tax rate on pass-through business income would exceed 50 percent in most states. Pass-through businesses, such as sole proprietorships, S corporations, and partnerships, make up a majority of businesses and majority of private sector employment in the United States.
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