The Republican-controlled US Senate is expected to vote Tuesday on a Democratic resolution aimed at overturning a major tax giveaway to large corporations that the Trump administration quietly implemented last year without congressional approval.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution is led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. In a memo released ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Wyden’s office noted that the Trump administration’s regulatory assault on the Biden-era corporate alternative minimum tax (CAMT) is expected to hand corporations and private equity firms more than $10 billion in tax breaks.
“This tax break is hidden inside new guidance, IRS Notice 2025-28,” Wyden’s office observed. “The notice makes changes to the rules governing how corporate giants and private equity firms can count income coming from partnerships they own, essentially giving those corporations a ‘choose-your-own-tax-rate’ adventure.”
The CAMT, approved under the Inflation Reduction Act in an effort to combat corporate tax avoidance, requires highly profitable US companies to pay a tax of at least 15% on so-called book profits, the numbers that are reported to shareholders.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, said in a statement opposing the Trump administration’s weakening of the CAMT that the Trump administration’s guidance “offers corporations a ‘rainbow of choices’ in how they calculate their share of partnership book income for minimum tax purposes, several of which deviate significantly from the statutory intent of tying corporate minimum tax liability to book income rather than taxable income.”
“The weakened rules, combined with the administration’s hollowing out of IRS enforcement (which make it less likely that corporations, complex partnerships, and their owners will pay what they legally owe) mean corporations are racking up large tax cuts that weren’t enacted by Congress,” the group added. “The corporate minimum tax was initially estimated to raise $222 billion over ten years, but the actual revenue will likely be far lower in part due to special giveaways already granted by the administration.”
Wyden’s effort to overturn the Trump administration’s unilateral erosion of the CAMT—which comes on top of the massive tax cuts for corporations that congressional Republicans approved last summer—also drew support from the conservative Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, whose president, Maya MacGuineas, said in a Tuesday statement that “we ought to be strengthening the tax base and improving tax enforcement, not opening up new loopholes that undermine the intent of the law.”
“The current Congressional Review Act measure would help restore the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax to its intended design,” said MacGuineas. “It would be a small first step—a baby step really—toward beginning to get our fiscal house in order.”
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