How the Trump adminration is giving even more tax breaks to the wealthy | World News

With little public scrutiny, the Trump adminration is handing out hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to some of the country’s most profitable companies and wealthiest investors.The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, through a series of new notices and proposed regulations, are giving breaks to giant private equity firms, crypto companies, foreign real estate investors, insurance providers and a variety of multinational corporations.
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The primary target: The adminration is rapidly gutting a 2022 law intended to ensure that a sliver of the country’s most profitable corporations pay at least some federal income tax. The provision, the corporate alternative minimum tax, was passed Democrats and signed into law President Joe Biden.

It sought to stop corporations like Microsoft, Amazon and Johnson & Johnson from being able to report big profits to shareholders yet low tax liabilities to the federal government. It was projected to raise $222 billion over a decade.

But the succession of notices the Treasury and IRS have issued beginning this summer means the tax could bring in a fraction of that.

These breaks come in addition to the roughly $4 trillion package of tax cuts that President Donald Trump signed into law in July. The legislation, passed entirely Republicans, heavily benefits businesses and the ultrawealthy. It is projected to add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit and came with steep cuts to health care for the elderly and food stamps for the poorest Americans.

With its various tax relief provisions, the adminration is now effectively adding hundreds of billions of dollars in new breaks for big businesses and investors. The Treasury is empowered to write rules to help the IRS carry out tax laws passed Congress. But the aggressive actions of the Trump adminration raise questions about whether it is exceeding its legal authority.

Trump and congressional Republicans have attacked federal workers as instruments of the “deep state,” exercising power beyond anything authorized the law. Now the adminration is doing the same thing, several tax experts said, undermining laws that hit the ultrawealthy and big companies.

“Treasury has clearly been enacting unlegislated tax cuts,” said Kyle Pomerleau, a tax econom at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “Congress determines tax law. Treasury undermines this constitutional principle when it asserts more authority over the structure of the tax code than Congress provides it.”

The alternative minimum tax isn’t the adminration’s only effort to roll back taxes on large businesses and wealthy individuals. Last month, the Treasury and IRS granted new tax relief to foreign investors in U.S. real estate. In August, they withdrew regulations to prevent multinationals from avoiding taxes claiming duplicate losses in multiple countries at once.

And, as The New York Times previously reported, the Treasury and IRS have rolled back a crackdown on an aggressive tax shelter used big companies, including Occidental Petroleum and AT&T. That amounts to another $100 billion in cuts — and likely far more, according to tax advisers.

Changes like these are not widely publicized the Treasury, but are closely followed tax planners for the country’s biggest corporations — who are applauding the new guidelines. In notes to clients, advisers at KPMG celebrated the new “array of choices” available for investors seeking to avoid the corporate alternative minimum tax. They noted that the Treasury’s moves provided “significant flexibility” for clients to trim their bills, allowing them to “cherry-pick” the rules that best suit their needs.

A Treasury spokesperson said the new moves were “a practical approach that supports American investment and competitiveness” and were meant to replace the Biden adminration’s “compliance maze that would have buried taxpayers in red tape.” The spokesperson did not address the issue of whether the Treasury was exceeding its legal authority.

The Treasury’s actions are probably contributing hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal deficit, tax experts said. That is on top of the trillions that the legislation signed Trump in July is already adding to the deficit. Yet unlike laws passed Congress, Treasury is under no obligation to publicly account for revenue lost its actions — such as cutting spending to offset the money no longer being collected.

Doing it through the Treasury means “you can just give away the goodies to one group, without having to take back anything from another,” said Daniel Hemel, a law professor at New York University. This loophole, he said, is one “that previous adminrations have exploited and which the Trump adminration is exploiting more aggressively.

The actions Treasury over the past few months are an accelerated version of what the agency did during the first Trump adminration: Regulators killed off efforts to crack down on a lucrative estate tax avoidance strategy, and watered down new taxes on multinational companies in the 2017 Republican tax package.

Big companies effectively keep two sets of books — one for investors and another for the IRS. The profits they report to the IRS permit various deductions that can bring a firm’s tax rate far below the 21% corporate tax rate.

A holy grail of tax planning is figuring out a deduction that businesses can claim on their tax return — but one that they don’t report to investors, which would dent their profits, potentially hurt their stock price and thus depress compensation paid to executives.

In 2021, the Biden adminration was unable to get Congress to sign on to an international plan to tax multinational corporations. So the Democratic-led Congress revived an old idea to potentially achieve similar results imposing a tax on the same profits that corporations report to their investors.

That alternative minimum tax was part of a 2022 domestic policy law called the Inflation Reduction Act. The new tax would apply to big corporations with an effective tax rate below 15%.

Not everyone viewed the new tax positively. “But it’s a thing that they were able to do at that moment in time,” said Kimberly Clausing, a top Biden adminration Treasury tax official, and now a law professor at the UCLA.

The original proposal was relatively simple. Limited to a tiny group of corporations averaging profits of more than $1 billion a year, it would require IRS auditors to look at the income reported to shareholders. If the companies paid taxes at a rate of less than 15% on those earnings, the new tax would kick in. It would hit as few as 80 corporations, according to one study.

Industry lobs swung into action, and Democrats in Congress began carving out enormous exceptions, permitting deductions for, say, businesses investing in heavy machinery and wireless spectrum used the likes of T-Mobile and Verizon.

As a result of changes like these, the new tax’s projected revenue dropped to $222 billion from $319 billion, according to congressional estimates.

The amount of revenue is expected to shrink even more, in part because of the Treasury’s actions.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Trump signed into law in July provided well over $1 trillion in relief for big companies when they calculate their income tax bills. But those breaks didn’t extend to the separate calculation that corporations must make for their alternative minimum tax bill. As a result, the regular tax bills of many businesses promise to drop so sharply — below 15% — that they could be newly subject to the alternative minimum tax.

The new law could have swept in two of the biggest crypto firms, Coinbase and Strategy. In response, they sought rule changes for calculating the minimum tax. Three high-powered legal advisers — Michael Desmond, who served as the IRS chief counsel in the first Trump adminration; Andrew Strelka, formerly senior tax counsel in the Biden adminration; and Eugene Scalia, the labor secretary in the first Trump adminration — pushed to exempt “mark to market” gains reported to investors. Those gains reflect the increase in value of the investments held companies that haven’t been sold yet.

On Sept. 30, the IRS granted their request, explicitly citing “digital assets.” Big crypto companies “have been granted a reprieve,” lawyers at Vedder Price wrote.

Strategy declared within hours that it “no longer expects to become subject to” the minimum tax, after previously disclosing a potential multibillion-dollar bill under the new tax.

Coinbase said in a statement that it supported the Trump adminration’s approach to the regulations for adminering the minimum tax. Strategy did not respond to a request for comment.

The crypto companies “owe tax and they’re not happy about it, so they’re going to the Trump adminration for a special carve-out,” complained Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee.

Some energy firms are already benefiting, too. Cheniere Energy, the giant natural gas exporter, disclosed in a securities filing last month that, thanks to the most recent Treasury notice, it was entitled to a refund of $380 million of previously paid alternative minimum tax.

Private equity firms are yet another beneficiary. Beginning in early 2023, the industry giant Blackstone pressed for a number of provisions to be included in the regulations to adminer the minimum tax.

This summer, Blackstone succeeded. Much of the recent guidance grants Blackstone’s requests, giving private equity firms enormous flexibility to calculate their bills.

A Blackstone spokesperson declined to comment.

The regulations also provide new flexibility for insurance companies in using so-called tax losses. For one, the new rules permit some insurers to use those losses to reduce their bills under the minimum tax — even for prior years.

“They’re effectively repealing the statute,” said Monte Jackel, a tax lawyer and former IRS official, referring to the minimum tax law.