FAQ: The One Big Beautiful Bill, Explained
Our experts explain how this major tax legislation may affect you and how policymakers can better improve the tax code.
24 min readExplore our latest tax policy research, analysis, and commentary of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB).
Our experts explain how this major tax legislation may affect you and how policymakers can better improve the tax code.
24 min read
How will recent federal tax changes affect you?
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Notably, the OBBBA makes permanent the individual tax changes first put in place by the TCJA, which avoids a tax hike on an estimated 62 percent of tax filers in 2026.
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Our analysis of the major tax provisions included in the OBBBA finds it will increase long-run GDP by 0.7 percent. The major tax provisions will reduce federal tax revenue by nearly $5.2 trillion between 2025 and 2034, 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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For Congress, work on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is done. But in state capitols, the work has not yet begun. Many of the tax changes in the federal reconciliation act flow through to state tax codes—automatically in some states, and subject to an update in states’ Internal Revenue Code conformity date in others.
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The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) simultaneously increased tax progressivity and decreased redistribution in the tax code. Our estimates suggest the OBBBA similarly combines a more progressive tax system with a lower degree of tax redistribution.
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Expensing for manufacturing structures is a significant step forward for the tax treatment of structures, but it could be improved in several ways.
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We break down the House GOP’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill—a sweeping tax package designed to extend key parts of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act before they expire in 2026.
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.
Lawmakers are right to be concerned about deficits and economic growth. The best path to address those concerns is to ensure OBBB provides permanent full expensing of capital investment, avoids inefficient tax cuts, and offsets remaining revenue losses by closing tax loopholes and reducing spending.
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The Senate draft overall makes more changes to international tax policy than the House draft. On net the changes are positive.
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The Senate’s version of the OBBB restores the benefit of avoiding the SALT deduction cap with PTETs for all pass-through businesses, while placing new limits on the extent of the workarounds.
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The House-passed reconciliation bill leaves out Trump’s promise to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, opting instead to expand the standard deduction for seniors.
Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) CREATE JOBS Act prioritizes permanence for the most cost-effective tax reforms—expensing and Neutral Cost Recovery (NCRS)—to boost growth in a relatively fiscally responsible way.
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The final House bill makes impressive cuts to the IRA green energy tax credits, but it does so in part by introducing more complexity.
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President’s Trump’s policies would throw high-tax states a life raft as they swim against the tide—before potentially hitting all states with a tariff-induced economic tsunami that could force lawmakers’ hands and reverse recent tax relief.
Rather than permanently expanding a complicated, nonneutral tax break, Congress should prioritize permanence for the most neutral and pro-growth policies like bonus depreciation and R&D expensing.
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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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The House-passed “One Big Beautiful Bill” includes a new 3.5 percent tax on remittances, or non-commercial transfers of money that people in the US send to people abroad.
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The House tax and spending bill leaves in place a long-standing provision that exempts credit unions from federal and state income tax, allowing them to compete unfairly with banks and, increasingly, to buy them.
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As the Senate considers next steps for the House-passed “big, beautiful” tax bill, the battle lines have been drawn for a showdown over the state and local tax (SALT) deduction.
From generous tax breaks to costly trade-offs, the House GOP’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill has a little of everything. It’s a sweeping attempt to extend key provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act before they expire in 2026—but what’s actually in it?
The House reconciliation bill includes numerous changes to the tax code: good, bad, and ugly. However, the new corporate alternative minimum tax, or CAMT, goes largely untouched.
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The EV fee in the reconciliation package would help the fiscal situation but would overcorrect the hole in the gas tax base EVs create. There are intermediate options, such as VMT taxes for EVs and commercial traffic or pairing flat EV fees with gas and diesel tax increases, that would be incrementally better than the reconciliation package’s approach.
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For owners of pass-through businesses, the reconciliation package (1) raises the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap, (2) denies the benefit of pass-through entity-level taxes that had previously worked around the SALT cap for such pass-through businesses, and (3) increases the Section 199A deduction for qualifying pass-through entities.
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The House of Representatives just passed President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” marking a critical step in the Republican tax agenda. At first glance, the bill might appear to complete the legacy of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). But it falls short of emulating the TCJA’s core strengths in two key respects: it doesn’t prioritize economic growth, and it doesn’t simplify the tax code.
As the US House hashes out its “One, Big, Beautiful Bill,” statehouse lawmakers are watching closely, given the impact of both its tax and spending provisions on state budgets.
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The US Ways and Means Committee’s “Big Beautiful Bill” includes a retaliatory provision called Section 899, along with an expansion of the base erosion and anti-abuse tax (BEAT).
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