On December 17, 2025, two Republicans filed the same bill in the two chambers of Congress. One went to the House Ways and Means Committee. The other went to Senate Finance. Neither has moved since.

The bill has one job, and its title says it: to "terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organizations." In practice that means letting the Secretary of the Treasury declare any nonprofit in America a terrorist supporter and shut off the tax status it runs on.

It is not a new idea. It is the back half of a bill Claudia Tenney introduced and pushed through the House in 2024 — and the version that came back in December has quietly dropped the front half, the part that made her bill hard to vote against.

What the bill actually does

Tenney introduced H.R. 9495 in September 2024 and called it the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act. Here is the machinery, in the text the House passed:

Treasury mails a nonprofit a letter saying the Secretary intends to designate it. The letter has to name the group Treasury says it supported, and give "a description of such material support or resources" — but only, the bill says, "to the extent consistent with national security and law enforcement interests." In other words, the government decides how much of the evidence you get to see. It can decide the answer is none.

The organization then has 90 days to do one of two things. It can prove it didn't do it — "to the satisfaction of the Secretary," meaning the person accusing you is also the person judging whether you've cleared yourself. Or it can confess: get the money back, promise in writing never to do it again, and hope. Fail at both and the designation lands.

If you sue, the government's classified evidence can be handed to the judge "ex parte and in camera" — a private session your lawyers are not in.

There is no criminal charge in any of this. No conviction. No jury. A cabinet secretary writes a letter, and a charity, a university, or a news outlet organized as a nonprofit loses the tax status it runs on.

That is why the ACLU pulled together a coalition of more than 180 organizations — Planned Parenthood, the AFL-CIO, the United Auto Workers, the NAACP — to tell Congress the bill was "not only dangerous, but unnecessary," and would hand the incoming administration power to "muzzle, punish, and effectively shut down tax-exempt organizations without transparency or appropriate due process."

What Tenney said her bill did

Here is how Tenney described her own bill the day it passed:

"Additionally, this legislation requires the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of any organization that provides financial support or resources to designated terrorist groups."

Read that against the text. It isn't the IRS, it's the Treasury Secretary — a political appointee. It isn't limited to groups that "provide financial support," it covers "material support or resources" above "a de minimis amount" at any point in the previous three years. And nothing in it requires the government to prove the accusation to anyone but itself.

She described a narrow anti-terror provision. She wrote a designation power.

Hiding behind hostages

The other half of Tenney's bill was genuinely good, genuinely bipartisan, and had nothing to do with nonprofits: it stopped the IRS from charging Americans late fees and penalties for taxes they couldn't file while they were being held hostage abroad.

That relief already existed as its own clean bill. In March 2024 Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat, introduced it — and Tenney signed on as an original cosponsor. Senators Chris Coons and Mike Rounds ran the Senate version, and announced that it had "unanimously cleared the Senate", urging the House to just pass it.

The ACLU said the same thing in plain terms: the hostage provision "already passed the Senate as a stand-alone bill," not a single member of Congress had objected to it, and "the fastest way for it to become law is for the House to simply pass the Senate bill."

Six months after cosponsoring the clean bill, Tenney wrote a new one that welded the hostage relief to the nonprofit designation power. Anyone who voted no could be told they'd voted against hostages.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas named it:

"In this mislabeled bill, House Republicans are hiding behind hostages."

Tenney's press release leaned on a hostage from her own district — Ryan Corbett, a western New Yorker the Taliban had held since August 2022. Corbett came home in a prisoner swap on January 21, 2025, after 894 days. The tax relief he and others were owed still isn't law.

The vote that tells you everything

The House voted on H.R. 9495 twice in ten days, and the two roll calls are the whole story.

On November 12, 2024, Republican leaders ran it under suspension of the rules, which needs two-thirds. In the few days beforehand, more than 100,000 people sent messages to their members of Congress asking them to vote no. It failed, 256 to 145 — 204 Republicans and 52 Democrats for it, 144 Democrats and one Republican against.

Nine days later leadership brought it back under a rule needing only a simple majority. This time it passed, 219 to 184. Republicans voted the same way: 204 yes, one no. Thomas Massie was the only Republican to vote against it either time.

The Democrats moved. Fifty-two yes votes became fifteen. Nothing in the bill had changed. What had changed was November 5 — Donald Trump had won, and the question stopped being abstract. The power in the bill would belong to his Treasury Secretary.

Tenney's cosponsors included David Kustoff and Nicole Malliotakis. Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy and Mike Lawler all voted for it. Ways and Means chairman Jason Smith, whose committee had reported it out, called the effort to block it "a shameful partisan play."

The Senate received the bill on December 2, 2024, and never touched it. It died there.

They went ahead without the law

Here's the part that should settle any argument about whether the ACLU was being dramatic.

On September 25, 2025, Trump signed a national security memo called NSPM-7, directing federal agencies to disrupt the financing of "domestic terrorism and organized political violence" — and directing them at tax-exempt groups. The ACLU called it "a fever dream of conspiracies, outright falsehoods" that stitches real criminal acts together with protests against the president. We've written about what that memo is already being used to justify — contractors scanning social media around the clock, subpoenas unmasking people who criticize ICE, and no charges filed against any of them.

And you don't have to imagine what happens when a politician gets to hang the terrorist label on a nonprofit, because governors are already doing it with state law. In Texas, Greg Abbott declared the country's largest Muslim civil rights group a terrorist organization — and twelve of the thirteen reasons he gave came out of a report by an anti-Muslim think tank, including a claim about the FBI that appears to be false.

That is the world Tenney's designation power was written for.

It's back, and the shield is gone

The bills filed on December 17, 2025 are the nonprofit half of Tenney's bill, standing alone. No hostage relief. No cover. The House version was filed by David Kustoff — one of the people who cosponsored Tenney's original.

It sits in Ways and Means — Tenney's own committee, the one she sits on. And in that same committee, untouched since March 5, 2025, sits the clean hostage tax bill that French Hill introduced and Tenney cosponsored on day one. Seventeen months, no hearing, no markup, no vote.

The half of her bill that helps Americans who were held hostage has gone nowhere. The half that lets a cabinet secretary shut down a charity is the half that keeps coming back.

Source

The full text and legislative history: H.R. 9495 — Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, 118th Congress, sponsored by Rep. Claudia Tenney. Photo: official congressional portrait.