ITEP’s latest report on corporate tax avoidance paints a clear – and worrisome – picture of corporate consolidation. Just six corporations – Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta and J.P. Morgan Chase – raked in 42 percent of the total tax subsidies that 706 profitable U.S. corporations received in 2025.
This is, in part, the predictable consequence of a dramatic concentration of corporate profits.
Before 2025, no U.S. company had ever reported more than $100 billion in U.S. income. Last year three companies blew through this barrier. Alphabet led the way with $144 billion in U.S. profits, with Nvidia and Microsoft close behind at $123 billion and $101 billion, respectively. Add in Amazon’s $89 billion in U.S. pretax income, and that means that just four companies enjoyed a quarter of nationwide profits as measured in ITEP’s report. Even so, the tax breaks enjoyed by the biggest companies in our sample go far beyond the outsized share one would expect based on these companies’ profits.
Alphabet disclosed receiving $3.9 billion in tax breaks last year from the Foreign-Derived Deduction Eligible Income (FDDEI) tax break, which was introduced by the 2017 Trump tax cuts and expanded under the 2025 Trump tax cuts. The most recent official estimate of the cost of federal tax breaks pegs FDDEI’s 2025 cost at $14.6 billion. The companies tallied in ITEP’s new report blew right through that estimate, disclosing $18.2 billion of FDDEI tax breaks last year; Alphabet alone enjoyed over 17 percent of those tax breaks. Nvidia’s 18 percent means that those two companies alone received 35 percent of documented FDII breaks.
Last year’s Trump tax law also allowed companies to immediately write off their research expenses instead of gradually deducting them over time, as was previously allowed. R&D expense was Meta’s single largest tax break, reducing the company’s tax bill by at least $12.6 billion in 2025. This was over a third of the $37 billion in R&D expensing tax breaks disclosed by the 706 companies in our report, and the single biggest one-year benefit from any single tax break ITEP has ever recorded. Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft each disclosed saving over $1 billion using this tax break, meaning that these four companies collectively reaped well over half the nationwide benefits from the R&D expensing tax breaks disclosed by profitable companies in 2025.
Microsoft last year became the first company to disclose over $10 billion in accelerated depreciation tax breaks, raking in $11.9 billion from the tax break turbocharged by last year’s “bonus depreciation” provision. Microsoft’s haul was 13 percent of all the depreciation tax breaks disclosed in our study. Alphabet ($3.3 billion), Amazon ($6.5), and Meta ($4.9) collectively added another $14.8 billion in depreciation tax breaks, meaning these four companies enjoyed 30 percent of the depreciation tax breaks nationwide last year.
Meta’s $3.9 billion in R&D tax credits (another provision that, like the new expensing provision discussed above, is supposed to encourage companies to spend more on socially-helpful research) topped the list in 2025, but Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft also each grabbed more than $1 billion in these credits last year, meaning that these five companies enjoyed an eye-popping 45 percent of the R&D tax credits disclosed by 706 companies in 2025.
The clear picture that emerges from ITEP’s new report is a tax system that is systematically making the richest corporations richer at the expense of the rest of us. But the reasons to be concerned about these highly concentrated tax breaks aren’t restricted to the economic sphere.
A lifetime ago the Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis reportedly noted that “we can have a democratic society, or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.” As the influx of corporate money in this fall’s midterm elections reminds us, a system of democratic control that relies on public money is vulnerable to the influence of the very wealthiest individuals and their owners – and our tax laws shouldn’t fast-track that process.
Given our findings, it goes without saying that each of the tax breaks discussed here should be reformed, pared back or outright repealed. But the top-loaded distribution of tax benefits documented in our latest report suggests that Congress could sharply reduce the cost of these giveaways by simply focusing their benefits on the smaller businesses for whom such tax breaks might affect their investment decisions.
The idea that the hugely profitable tech corporations now dominating our economic and political landscape need tax breaks in order to realize their investment vision is ludicrous on its face – but ITEP’s new report makes it clear that the main legacy of the Trump administration’s two rounds of corporate tax cuts has been to further enrich the owners of a handful of the wealthiest corporations in human history.
