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Resolution Aims to Undo ‘Hidden’ $10 Billion Trump Tax Giveaway to Massive Corporations
"Congress must not accept this unjustifiable, $10.3 billion giveaway," said the office of Sen. Ron Wyden, who is leading the repeal effort.
Feb 10, 2026
The Republican-controlled US Senate is expected to vote Tuesday on a Democratic resolution aimed at overturning a major tax giveaway to large corporations that the Trump administration quietly implemented last year without congressional approval.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution is led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. In a memo released ahead of Tuesday's vote, Wyden's office noted that the Trump administration's regulatory assault on the Biden-era corporate alternative minimum tax (CAMT) is expected to hand corporations and private equity firms more than $10 billion in tax breaks.
"This tax break is hidden inside new guidance, IRS Notice 2025-28," Wyden's office observed. "The notice makes changes to the rules governing how corporate giants and private equity firms can count income coming from partnerships they own, essentially giving those corporations a 'choose-your-own-tax-rate' adventure."
The CAMT, approved under the Inflation Reduction Act in an effort to combat corporate tax avoidance, requires highly profitable US companies to pay a tax of at least 15% on so-called book profits, the numbers that are reported to shareholders.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, said in a statement opposing the Trump administration's weakening of the CAMT that the Trump administration's guidance "offers corporations a 'rainbow of choices' in how they calculate their share of partnership book income for minimum tax purposes, several of which deviate significantly from the statutory intent of tying corporate minimum tax liability to book income rather than taxable income."
"The weakened rules, combined with the administration’s hollowing out of IRS enforcement (which make it less likely that corporations, complex partnerships, and their owners will pay what they legally owe) mean corporations are racking up large tax cuts that weren’t enacted by Congress," the group added. "The corporate minimum tax was initially estimated to raise $222 billion over ten years, but the actual revenue will likely be far lower in part due to special giveaways already granted by the administration."
Wyden's effort to overturn the Trump administration's unilateral erosion of the CAMT—which comes on top of the massive tax cuts for corporations that congressional Republicans approved last summer—also drew support from the conservative Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, whose president, Maya MacGuineas, said in a Tuesday statement that "we ought to be strengthening the tax base and improving tax enforcement, not opening up new loopholes that undermine the intent of the law."
"The current Congressional Review Act measure would help restore the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax to its intended design," said MacGuineas. "It would be a small first step—a baby step really—toward beginning to get our fiscal house in order."
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Shortsighted Business-as-Usual Is Crushing Nature, Warns Landmark Report
"The growth of the global economy has been at the cost of immense biodiversity loss, which now poses a critical and pervasive systemic risk to the economy, financial stability and human wellbeing."
Feb 10, 2026
A new report confirms that unchained economic growth driven by corporations seeking profits with too little concern for downside harm is having devastating impacts on biodiversity and natural systems across the planet while also undermining the health of the global economy in the long run.
The landmark new report published Monday by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was backed by over 150 nations after three years of research and analyses by 79 leading experts from 35 countries across all regions of the world.
What the research found is that "the current conditions in which businesses operate are not always compatible with achieving a just and sustainable future, and that these conditions also perpetuate systemic risks" with far-reaching implications.
"The growth of the global economy has been at the cost of immense biodiversity loss, which now poses a critical and pervasive systemic risk to the economy, financial stability and human wellbeing," warned the IPBES in a statement.
“We must place true value on the environment and go beyond gross domestic product as a measure of human progress and wellbeing. Let us not forget that when we destroy a forest, we are creating GDP. When we overfish, we are creating GDP.” —António Guterres, UN Secretary-General
With natural resources "being depleted and degraded faster now than any period in human history," the report is designed to warn humanity, equip policymakers with knowledge, and provide solutions that could mitigate the crisis of biodiversity loss.
The report notes that "unsustainable economic activity and a focus on growth as measured by the gross domestic product, has been a driver of the decline of biodiversity... and stands in the way of transformative change."
According to Alexander De Croo, an administrator with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), an IPBES partner organization, "Businesses are inseparable from the ecosystems they operate in: they both depend on them and profoundly impact them. As significant drivers of today’s planetary crises, businesses have contributed to climate change, biodiversity loss and cultural erosion."
At the same time, he added, these companies "have a critical role to play in advancing more sustainable solutions, a role already reflected in a growing number of initiatives." The real problem, the report finds, is how intractable the business-as-usual approach has been, with corporations resistant to changing their operations to put them more in line with nature and too little pressure coming from governments to force through more sustainable practices.
According to the report:
Current conditions perpetuate business-as-usual and do not support the transformative change necessary to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. For example, large subsidies that drive losses of biodiversity are directed to business activities with the support of lobbying by businesses and trade associations. In 2023, global public and private finance flows with directly negative impacts on nature, were estimated at $7.3 trillion, of which private finance accounted for $4.9 trillion, with public spending on environmentally harmful subsidies of about $2.4 trillion.
In contrast, $220 billion in public and private finance flows were directed in 2023 to activities contributing to the conservation and restoration of biodiversity, representing just 3% of the public funds and incentives that encourage harmful business behaviour or prevent behaviour beneficial to biodiversity.
“The loss of biodiversity is among the most serious threats to business,” said Prof. Stephen Polasky, co-chair of the assessment. “Yet the twisted reality is that it often seems more profitable to businesses to degrade biodiversity than to protect it. Business as usual may once have seemed profitable in the short term, but impacts across multiple businesses can have cumulative effects, aggregating to global impacts, which can cross ecological tipping points."
But Polasky goes on to say that the report "shows that business as usual is not inevitable," and that with better policies, "as well as financial and cultural shifts, what is good for nature is also what is best for profitability."
The IPBES assessment arrived alongside fresh warnings about the disastrous results that have stemmed from obsessive allegiance to gross domestic product (GDP) as the key economic indicator by governments and businesses worldwide.
In an interview with the Guardian on Monday, UN secretary general António Guterres suggested that the obsession with GDP was driving humanity toward a cliff.
“We must place true value on the environment and go beyond gross domestic product as a measure of human progress and wellbeing," Guterres said. "Let us not forget that when we destroy a forest, we are creating GDP. When we overfish, we are creating GDP."
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‘One More Billionaire Front Group’: Centrist Dems Mocked Over New Initiative Led by Corporate Lobbyist
Next American Era will be headed by Cheri Bustos, former chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who has lobbied for powerful corporations.
Feb 09, 2026
Centrist Democrats led by Cheri Bustos, a corporate lobbyist who previously headed her party's campaign arm in the US House, are launching a policy and advocacy organization aimed at pressuring Democrats to embrace the kind of "pro-growth" deregulatory agenda associated with the so-called "abundance" movement.
The new organization, named Next American Era, was formed "with an eye toward 2028" as Democrats work to recover from their crushing defeat to President Donald Trump in the 2024 elections, Axios reported Sunday, noting that the group describes itself as a "hub for center-left policy and advocacy."
Bustos, whose lobbying client list in 2025 included OpenAI and Larry Ellison's Oracle, said Next American Era plans to "air issue-focused ads during the midterm elections and the 2028 presidential campaign, but it won't endorse candidates," Axios reported.
Bustos said the founders of Next American Era share "many of the same principles as the Abundance movement," a loose assortment of organizations and individuals—including large corporations and prominent billionaires—broadly supporting views expressed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their 2025 book Abundance.
"She said cutting red tape, streamlining regulations, and supporting workforce training are among the top policy goals of her group, which is structured as a 501(c)(4) political nonprofit," Axios reported.
Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank, called those proposed objectives "some of the weakest economic policies we've polled in the last 18 months."
"Not sure why you’d want to put ads out on these for candidates unless it’s an opp," Owens added.
pic.twitter.com/eWbdnyiNig
— Alex Jacquez (@AlexSJacquez) February 9, 2026
Abundance takes aim at what Klein and Thompson characterize as an overly burdensome regulatory approach that is purportedly hindering progress toward more affordable housing, public transportation systems, and a renewable energy revolution. Critics, such as antitrust advocate Zephyr Teachout, have criticized the so-called abundance agenda as far too ambiguous.
"I still can’t tell after reading Abundance whether Klein and Thompson are seeking something fairly small-bore and correct (we need zoning reform) or nontrivial and deeply regressive (we need deregulation) or whether there is room within abundance for anti-monopoly politics and a more full-throated unleashing of American potential," Teachout wrote in her review of the book for Washington Monthly.
Critics have also noted the enthusiasm with which corporations and billionaires have glommed onto the abundance narrative.
"The ambiguity of the abundance agenda’s policy proposals, strategic or otherwise, allows private interests to leverage 'abundance' as a Trojan Horse for their preferences," the Revolving Door Project observed last year. "The growing abundance movement has institutional support from fossil fuel and Big Tech affiliates, including the sprawling Koch network and crypto and AI industry players."
Axios observed that Next American Era is one of "several center-left groups" that "have popped up or expanded in the past 18 months, including the think tank Searchlight Institute, Majority Democrats, and WelcomePAC."
"Just one more billionaire front group. Just one more neoliberal policy shop," reporter and political analyst Austin Ahlman wrote mockingly on social media in response to the launch of Next American Era. "Just one more polling outfit cooking the numbers on behalf of corporate interests and we’ll win bro, I promise."
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