Warren Publishes New Joint Tax Committee Analysis: Big, Beautiful Bill to Deliver $67 Billion in Retroactive Tax Breaks to Companies Next Year
“Next year, the federal government will spend five times more on these handouts than what it spends annually on childcare.”
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, published a new analysis from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) revealing that President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” will deliver $67 billion in retroactive tax breaks to corporations in 2026. The JCT analysis comes in response to a June 2025 request from Senator Warren for information on Republicans’ legislation to effectively expand the size of tax breaks that corporations will receive for research they have already conducted.
“Companies like Tesla and Amazon dumped millions into courting Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers, and now, these companies are getting massive checks to ‘incentivize’ research they already did years ago,” said Senator Warren. “Next year, the federal government will spend five times more on these handouts than what it spends annually on childcare. It’s another ugly example of Republicans rigging the tax code to help billionaire corporations while you suffer with higher costs.”
Along with a slew of giveaways to the wealthy and big corporations, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act ended corporations’ ability to immediately expense research and experimentation (R&E) starting in 2022. Since then, companies have been required to spread out their R&E deductions over a 5-year or 15-year window. But the Big, Beautiful Bill restored the R&D expensing regime retroactively. Now, R&E expenses can be fully deducted immediately, including for expenses incurred from 2022 to 2025, vastly increasing the value that giant corporations are receiving from the tax break.
In June, as Congressional Republicans worked to pass their Big, Beautiful Bill, Senator Warren wrote to JCT asking the committee to provide a breakdown, for each year from 2025 to 2034, of the revenue generated if retroactive research expenses were made ineligible under the law. JCT’s new analysis reveals that in 2026, President Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill will provide companies a whopping $67 billion for R&E that has already been conducted. The research tax breaks were originally meant to encourage new research expenditures, but by rewarding companies for research conducted in the past, the provision is providing corporations with a large windfall without incentivizing new research.
Senator Warren has previously raised the issue of Big Tech companies lobbying for billion-dollar tax handouts, spending lavishly on donations to President Trump’s inauguration, and pouring millions of dollars in campaign donations to President Trump and Republicans in Congress — all at the expense of everyday American families.
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