When Republicans sold Trump's budget bill, the promise was that cutting business taxes would come back to you — in wages, in prices, in jobs.

The receipts for 2025 are in. Here is where the money went.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has tracked $204 billion in federal tax breaks disclosed by publicly traded U.S. companies for 2025 so far. Six companies took $83 billion of it:

Microsoft's $18.7 billion is a record high for single-year federal tax breaks for one publicly traded company. Not a record for Microsoft. A record, period.

Put $83 Billion Next to What the Government Actually Collects

Here's the number that should stop you.

That $83 billion — six companies — "represents nearly 18 percent, or almost $1 out of every $5, of total federal corporation tax collections."

Read that again. The breaks handed to six firms are worth close to a fifth of everything Washington collects in corporate income tax from every corporation in America.

It is also more than the entire annual discretionary budget of the U.S. Department of Education.

"This is an extraordinary concentration of tax benefits among some of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world," said ITEP senior fellow Matthew Gardner.

And 88 Profitable Companies Paid Nothing at All

The $83 billion is the top of the pile. The bottom is worse.

At least 88 profitable U.S. corporations paid zero federal income tax in 2025, on more than $105 billion in U.S. pretax income.

Profitable. Not struggling, not losing money — profitable, to the tune of $105 billion, and their federal income tax bill was nothing.

The list includes Tesla ($5.7 billion in U.S. income), United Airlines ($4.3 billion), Southwest Airlines, Yum! Brands, Live Nation, PayPal, Block, Honeywell, HP, CVS Health, Walt Disney, Palantir, Coinbase, 3M, Duke Energy, Halliburton and others.

If you worked a full year and paid federal income tax, you paid more in federal income tax than Tesla did.

Where This Came From

ITEP is direct about the cause. Corporate tax avoidance "has increased at least in part due to" two things: Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

The specific machinery, per ITEP:

• Accelerated depreciation — used by 50+ companies, cutting $11.4 billion
• The new R&D expensing provision — 30+ companies, $4.4 billion
• Research and experimentation credits — 40+ companies, $1.6 billion
• Foreign-Derived Deduction Eligible Income — 10+ companies
• Executive stock option deductions — 12+ companies

That last one deserves a sentence of its own. When a company's stock goes up and executives cash in their options, the company gets to deduct it. The richer the executives get, the smaller the company's tax bill.

Separately, ITEP found four big tech companies avoided $51 billion in taxes and paid a combined effective tax rate of 4.9 percent — with much of that "likely from the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act".

4.9 percent. Lower than the rate on a part-time job.

What Was Cut to Pay For It

None of this happened in a vacuum. The same budget bill that produced these breaks paid for them.

It cut Medicaid. It cut food assistance. It let the health insurance tax credits lapse, which is why premiums are spiking for millions of people who buy their own coverage.

And it was written in a way designed to keep you from reading it. One provision buried on page 1,081 carried a 10-year prison sentence — for leaking tax return information.

A year on, Republicans were still holding anniversary events celebrating the bill.

The Promise and the Receipt

The argument for all of this was never "let's hand Microsoft $18.7 billion." It was that lower business taxes would lift everyone — that the money would flow into higher pay, more hiring, cheaper goods.

Check your own numbers against that promise. Groceries. Rent. Your premium. Your paycheck.

Then look at the table at the top of this page.

The money did not trickle anywhere. It stopped at six companies, and it is worth almost a fifth of what the entire American corporate sector pays in federal income tax.

That was not an accident or a loophole nobody noticed. It is what the law does. It is what it was written to do, and every Republican who voted for the budget bill voted for this outcome — whether or not they told their voters that's what it was.

Sources

• As Americans Struggled to Buy Basics, These 6 Companies Got $83 Billion in Tax Breaks Last Year — Common Dreams, August 2026
• Six Companies Reaped $83 Billion in Federal Tax Breaks in 2025 — Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, August 14, 2026
• At Least 88 Profitable U.S. Corporations Paid Zero Federal Income Tax in 2025 — ITEP