President Trump and Republican lawmakers passed their major tax-and-spending cut bill earlier this summer, faster than almost anyone else in Washington, D.C., was expecting.
Now, they’re planning their second act.
The new law extended Republicans’ 2017 tax-rate reductions while making big cuts to healthcare and other social programs, adding $3.4 trillion to the national deficit through the next decade.
But there’s still plenty of tax policy left for Congress to tackle this fall, including a number of expiring provisions that weren’t covered in the main reconciliation package.
Trump and Republicans could attempt to unite around another tax package and budget resolution, the vehicle on which it could pass both the House and Senate with simple majorities.
“It is a once-in-a-trifecta opportunity. You get two shots, and even if you use your first shot, you still have to try to use your second shot,” accountancy KPMG’s national tax principal Jennifer Acuna told The Hill. “There’s still fiscal year 2026 that can be utilized for a reconciliation bill.”
“Congress is going to have the opportunity,” she added. “They’re going to at least try to utilize that reconciliation opportunity.”
But other tax watchers think the passage of Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will take the steam out of efforts this fall to pass a second reconciliation bill, making a bipartisan tax extenders package that could be tacked onto other legislation the more viable way to get more tax policy done.
“Least in terms of likelihood is some sort of reconciliation 2.0 – Too Big, Too Beautiful, or whatever we’re calling it,” Rohit Kumar, co-head of accountancy PwC’s national tax practice and former Senate GOP aide, told The Hill. “I’m just pretty skeptical that Republicans are going to be able to unite on another budget resolution and then another budget reconciliation bill.”
Kumar said he thought a second reconciliation bill was only really likely during a potential lame duck session next year, contingent on Republicans’ losing one or both chambers of Congress during the midterm elections.
“You could see Republicans make an argument, ‘Let’s do a reconciliation bill, because it’s our last chance to do one, at least for the next couple years,’” he added.
Others think the early arrival of Trump’s tax cut extensions makes a second reconciliation bill more likely — even imperative — arguing that it would be a missed opportunity for Republicans not to push ahead with more wide-ranging legislation ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
There are several expirations of tax credits at the end of this year that were not included in the Republicans’ tax-and-spending cut bill passed over the summer.
They include temporary extensions of the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax credits, the new markets tax credit, and the work opportunity tax credit. There are other tax issues percolating as well, some of which were left out of Republicans’ big bill and some of which made it in.
Those include major changes to gambling loss deductions, the failed effort of Republicans to expand the 199-A passthrough credit above 20 percent, and the exclusion of changes to tax rules for Americans living abroad.
Among these, the biggest driver of potential new tax legislation is by far the expiration of the ACA credits, which could present a political vulnerability for Republicans ahead of the midterms, especially after the “big beautiful bill” (OBBB) kicked about 10 million people off public health insurance, conservative policy groups have warned.
“Higher premiums will nullify OBBB benefits for working Americans,” Plymouth Union Public Research, a conservative policy group, warned GOP members last month. “The individuals who will see huge health care premium increases next year if enhanced credits expire are low- and middle-income workers … Instead of raising costs for these voters, Republicans should extend premium tax credits and help those losing Medicaid move to private coverage.”
Other conservatives in staunchly Republican states are sounding an alarm about the expiration of the premium credits, as well.
“Unless Congress acts soon, those enhanced tax credits will expire,” Julio Fuentes, head of the Florida State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce who worked on education initiatives from then-govenor, now Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and former Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), said earlier this month. “It [will mean] higher premiums, less coverage, and a real financial gut punch for Hispanic families.”
Democrats have already introduced legislation to extend the premium tax credits.
“If the … enhanced premium tax credits expire at the end of the year, 20 million Americans will see their health care costs skyrocket,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said in a statement released along with the legislation earlier this month. “That pain will be felt almost immediately.”
While all the tax cuts now under consideration for additional legislation are considerably smaller in revenue terms than what was passed in Republicans’ mainline agenda bill, the ACA credits are the largest of the bunch.
“Making the other expired provisions permanent might be a $15 to $20 billion exercise over 10 tens. The premium tax credits are running at about $30 billion a year,” Kumar said. “The premium tax credits are the 800-pound gorilla in this transaction.”
Despite bipartisan support for extending the ACA and other credits, a joint end-of-year tax package is far from a lock during a time of rancorous partisanship on Capitol Hill.
Only last year, party politics scuttled a tax bill put forward by the Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee and the Republican chair of the Ways and Means Committee. That bill would have expanded the child tax credit and reinstated several high-priority business credits by nixing a fraud-riddled employee retention credit, but it was voted down last minute by Republicans on fears that it would have handed Democrats a win ahead of the November election.
“The question is, do you have the numbers? Is there enough of that sentiment and motivation in both chambers to actually get that done? That’s ultimately a political question,” Garrett Watson, director of policy analysis at the right-leaning Tax Foundation, told The Hill. He called the provisions in the previous, failed tax extenders package “bigger bipartisanship issues” than anything under consideration at the moment.
Shared priorities like bonus depreciation, the research and development credit and the child tax credit “weren’t enough to overcome the partisan differences,” he noted.
Further complicating the prospects for a joint tax package are the objectives of the far-right Freedom Caucus, who got steamrolled during the passage of the $3.4 trillion big, beautiful bill and are highly unlikely to get on board with more deficit expansion.
“It’s the expanded version that was passed in the [American Rescue Plan Act] that are set to expire,” Acuna said. “It defaults to the pre-expansion levels. Going back to [that] is very costly.”
“Do Republicans have anything in their asks column that would meet the size of that ask? Unclear,” she said.
