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Politics
'They Are Hiding Stuff': Trump Administration Delays Data on Impact of GOP Tax Cuts
The New York Times reported last month that the Trump administration is also withholding IRS estimates of unpaid taxes.
Nina Olson, executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights and the former US taxpayer advocate, told Politico that she believes the administration is suppressing information that runs counter to its narrative about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which extended provisions of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the richest Americans and large corporations.
"I think they are hiding stuff that doesn't line up with all the crowing the CEO has been doing," Olson said, referring to IRS chief executive Frank Bisignano, who has celebrated the OBBBA as "historic tax relief for working families."
But an analysis released last week by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy showed that the OBBBA "overwhelmingly benefits the rich and corporations."
"While proponents of OBBBA often describe certain portions of the law that they argue benefit the middle class (such as tax breaks for tips and overtime) these provisions are a very small portion of the overall legislation which overwhelmingly benefits high-income people and corporations," the group observed. "Since the 2025 law was enacted, enormous profitable corporations like Meta, Amazon, Google, Tesla, and many others have paid extremely low effective tax rates (from 0 percent to 8 percent) in large part due to OBBBA."
The analysis found that, overall, Trump's major economic policies have hiked taxes and consumer costs for low- and middle-income families while cutting them for the top 1%.
“The tax cuts Americans were promised—which were tilted heavily to the top to start—are being overwhelmed by higher prices and higher healthcare costs for most families,” said Steve Wamhoff, ITEP's federal policy director. “When you look at the full picture rather than tax cuts in isolation, the result is striking: The typical American in every income group is paying more, except that the richest 1% is the one group that comes out ahead.”
After Raid of Omar’s Home and Latest ICE Shooting, Ramirez Unveils Bill to ‘Dismantle’ DHS
The bill, titled the Reimagining Safety Act, would not only eliminate ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). It seeks to eliminate immigration detention altogether and begin the process of replacing it with a civil court-based immigration system run through the US Department of Justice (DOJ).
In a dramatic departure from current immigration procedures, all deportations would need to be approved by Congress before they could proceed.
The bill comes just one day after agents with the DHS Investigations unit raided the home of Ramirez's colleague, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), as part of a federal criminal investigation related to her citizenship documents.
The investigation---which follows years of attacks by President Donald Trump and other Republicans against Omar's Somali background and Muslim faith, and comes just weeks before an election---has been described by critics as intimidation against a political opponent.
"For almost a decade, Trump and Republicans have lied about Congresswoman Omar to silence her dissent," Ramirez said on Monday. "My sister [Ilhan] has not backed down, so now they are using DHS and the federal government to target and persecute her."
"We must strip them of their weapons," she said. "We must dismantle DHS."
Under Ramirez's legislation, a new agency called the Department of Community Safety would assume DHS's duties. This would include running the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which handles the federal response to natural disasters and other emergencies.
The new agency would use DHS's massive pot of federal funding for programs that aim to stop gun violence and other crime; provide support to asylum seekers at the border; redirect federal resources toward community needs like healthcare, housing, education, and emergency preparedness; and support community-based safety programs that do not adopt the militarized law enforcement of DHS.
Other functions of DHS would be scattered across different agencies: Immigration enforcement would belong to the DOJ, the Department of Transportation would take over the Transportation Security Administration and Coast Guard, and the Treasury Department would conduct customs enforcement.
Some of the expansive powers introduced during the War on Terror would also be rolled back: Those without criminal convictions or warrants would no longer be able to be put on "no-fly" lists, which civil liberties advocates have long criticized for stripping people of their right to travel on arbitrary, often racist, grounds.
The legislation would also eliminate the authority of the secretary of state to declare "foreign terrorist" organizations, a power that has been wielded to criminalize protest.
Ramirez told The Intercept that the need to abolish the agency was also underscored by an ICE agent's shooting of 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck last week in New York. Belgal was shot through the window of his car while his 5-year-old child was in the back seat. In the past year, ICE agents have shot at least 25 people, and six of those shootings have been fatal.
Since Trump's return to office in January 2025, at least 58 people have died in immigration custody, according to the ACLU—a dramatic spike from previous administrations.
ICE agents arrive to clear protesters from a gate outside the Delaney Hall detention facility during a demonstration protesting the transfer of detainees and conditions inside the facility on June 11, 2026, in Newark, New Jersey. (Photo by Andres Kudacki/Getty Images)
The rising death toll comes as the Trump administration and Republican Congress have dramatically expanded DHS and its budget to create a massive network of new detention camps, where immigrants (and some US citizens)—most of whom have not been convicted of crimes—have been disappeared, often arbitrarily, denied access to legal representation, and subjected to severe physical mistreatment.
Some noncitizens have been targeted explicitly over their political speech, including the hundreds of students who suddenly found their legal status stripped over their participation in pro-Palestine protests, many of whom were summarily arrested and faced with the threat of deportation.
Ramirez told The Intercept all of these were examples of how DHS is "not rogue," but working as designed.
"For 23 years, since its inception, DHS has been utilized by the government to target and persecute those they consider the public enemy," she said, "whether it is Muslim Americans, Haitians escaping violence, Latinos yearning for a better life, or dissenting voices demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine and the kidnapping of our neighbors.”
People protest outside a federal immigration office after a man was fatally shot by ICE agents on July 14, 2026, in Scarborough, Maine. (Photo by Ryan Murphy/Getty Images)
During the second Trump administration, public opinion has dramatically shifted against ICE, to the point where a plurality of voters, 48%, said they wanted the agency abolished in a July YouGov poll. In a February poll by the Public Religion Institute, 60% said they opposed increasing ICE's budget, compared with just 36% who favored it.
“In the past, the type of policy we are fighting for would have been written off as outlandish, too ‘extreme,’ or simply put, impossible," said Viviana Baraja, a Chicago-based immigrants' rights advocate who has helped to launch Ramirez's proposal.
"I have seen this administration make the most impossible nightmares possible," Baraja said. "And in the most distorted way, it has strengthened my resolve that if the worst can be possible, we can also dare to dream and to believe that the best can be possible too."
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