Andrew Duehren, Big Businesses Are Cashing In on Trump’s Tax Cuts, N.Y. Times (Dec. 12, 2025):

In the months since the passage [of the 2025 budget bill] in July, corporations like Walmart, Amazon, Verizon and Eli Lilly have all disclosed in securities filings that the law would reduce their cash tax payments in the near term. AT&T Inc. projected that it would save as much as $2 billion in taxes just this year.

Those corporate tax savings have already started to have an effect on the federal budget. Between July and November, the last full month of data, revenue from the corporate income tax has dropped by roughly a third, or $52 billion, compared to the same period the year before, according to Treasury data.

Driving the cash savings is not a change in the corporate tax rate, which Republicans kept at 21 percent. Instead, a constellation of tax breaks has given companies a better ability to reduce the amount of income subject to tax. Rather than writing off the costs of new investments and research projects bit by bit over several years, companies are now able to deduct the full cost of these expenses in one year.

The seemingly technical timing change was the target of years of business lobbying in Washington. Companies had previously been able to deduct some of these costs this way, but Congress had let the tax breaks expire in recent years.