A new Congressional Budget Office report finds the Trump administration’s latest corporate tax cuts, enacted earlier this summer, are already worsening the already-challenging federal budget deficit. Corporate income taxes for the fiscal year that ended in September are $77 billion lower than in the previous year, a 15 percent drop.
CBO attributes this drop to the effect of the new tax law’s absurdly generous bonus depreciation measure, which allows companies to immediately write off the cost of capital investments and likely prompted many companies to make smaller estimated tax payments in the most recent quarter.
We can’t get a full breakdown of which companies are the biggest beneficiaries of the Trump administration’s latest largesse: most with substantial tax cuts from the new law will disclose these cuts (if at all) when they publish their annual financial reports for 2025, which generally will happen in February or March 2026. But some corporate leaders have made ad hoc disclosures of their expected tax cuts in earnings calls done in conjunction with the release of their most recent quarterly reports. This was reported first by the Wall Street Journal’s Richard Rubin in a September article revealing Verizon’s $1.5 billion tax savings from the new law.
Here are some of the more notable disclosures we have tabulated from transcripts of these earnings calls:
- Telecom giant AT&T expects “cash taxes to be lower by $1.5 billion to $2 billion in 2025” as a result of the new Trump tax cuts. (An ITEP analysis found that the last round of Trump tax cuts, enacted in 2017, pushed the company’s effective federal income tax rate to just 3 percent in its first four years.)
- AT&T competitor T-Mobile also anticipates a $1.5 billion annual tax cut.
- Lockheed Martin anticipates a half-billion dollar cash tax savings from the new law, attributing this mainly to the new law allowing immediate write-off of research and development expenses.
- MGM Resorts cites the new tax law as a reason why it no longer expects to pay even a dime of corporate income tax this year, noting it has “updated our tax forecast from a liability of approximately $100 million this year to actually a positive refund of $100 million in 2025” due in part to the bonus depreciation provision.
- The petroleum company OneOK discloses that its $1.5 billion tax savings from the new law will put the company in a “no tax rate type of environment through [20]28.” ITEP’s analysis of OneOK tax payments during the first four years of the 2017 Trump tax laws found that the company’s federal tax rate averaged 0 percent during this period.
Among the new corporate giveaways in this summer’s tax law is a weakening of the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (CAMT), the provision put in place by the Biden administration in 2022 to require that very large corporations pay at least some income tax no matter how many tax breaks they would otherwise be able to claim. The new law provides a carveout for oil and gas companies designed to weaken this important backstop to the corporate tax—and it’s already working as Republican lawmakers intended.
- Devon Energy says it “expect[s] to no longer be subject to the corporate alternative minimum tax. As a result, we anticipate our ongoing current tax rate will be significantly lower than previous estimates, ranging between 5% and 10%.”
- Targa Resources also discloses that “we expect we will no longer be subject to the corporate alternative minimum tax” going forward, and the oil company APA also expects a reduced CAMT hit going forward.
These informal disclosures, almost all of which were made in earnings calls by corporate leaders in response to questions from industry analysts, present a very incomplete picture of which companies have pocketed the $77 billion decline in corporate tax cuts shown in the new CBO data; as corporate annual financial reports are submitted in early 2026, we’ll likely get a more complete picture.
But the evidence so far suggests that the companies enjoying the biggest tax breaks include some of the large multinationals that were already paying close to zero before this latest tax cut was passed. Disturbingly, these disclosures also send a clear signal that one of the biggest wins for corporate tax fairness in the past quarter century, President Biden’s Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, is squarely in the sights of Republicans in Congress.
