The One Big Beautiful Bill Is a Big Corporate Cash Grab

Here’s a look at the industries that won in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” and one that didn’t quite get everything it wanted.

Gage Skidmore / Flickr

By Donald Shaw and David Moore, Sludge

As the Republican Congress was putting together the multi-trillion-dollar “megabill,” corporate America was hard at work to stuff it with their favorite handouts, tax cuts and loopholes. Lobbyists flooded Capitol Hill, spending tens of millions of dollars to make sure the package would come out in their favor.

Corporate-funded groups blanketed swing states with ads, while billionaire GOP donors popped up in op-ed pages to sell the policymakers on provisions that would impact their bottom lines. Now, with a razor-thin Republican majority managing to push it through the Senate, the bill is packed with favors for powerful interests—from private equity barons and fossil fuel giants to weapons companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers.

While the bill will make life harder for millions of current Medicaid recipients and low-income families, a wide swath of corporate America came out as big winners. Here’s a look at the industries that won in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” and one that didn’t quite get everything it wanted.

Winner: Big Business

The megabill restores 100% bonus depreciation, allowing companies to fully and immediately write off the cost of investments like machinery, vehicles, and other pieces of equipment. First enacted by the Trump tax cuts package of 2017, the provision has been phasing out and is set to sunset completely under current law. But big business lobbying groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers mounted a major pressure campaign to bring it back. It’s a massive tax break that overwhelmingly benefits the largest corporations in sectors like manufacturing, fossil fuels, and construction. According to the tax experts at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, some of the companies that benefited the most from the tax break when it was originally in effect from 2018-22 include Facebook, Verizon, and Edison International. In early June, billionaire GOP donor Jeff Yass and David McIntosh, president of the conservative Club for Growth, penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal touting the policy’s effects and lamenting that it had begun to sunset.

Winner: Big Pharma

Drug companies successfully pushed for the bill to include the ORPHAN Cures Act, which exempts more drugs from being subject to price negotiations with Medicare. The legislation is promoted by its pharmaceutical industry-funded sponsors as a way to protect treatments for rare diseases, but in practice it expands a loophole that companies can use to protect their high-priced drugs from cost controls. Under current law, drugs that are used exclusively to treat one rare disease are protected from price negotiations, an exception that was designed to ensure companies are incentivized to develop drugs that would serve a small number of patients. This provision will shield drugs with multiple orphan indications, even if they are already on the market and highly profitable. The pharmaceutical industry’s major trade groups PhRMA and BIO pushed hard to get this in the bill, and they could breathe a sigh of relief late Monday night when the Senate parliamentarian ruled the measure could remain in the package.

Winner: Metallurgical Coal Companies

One bizarre provision in the reconciliation bill will expand an advanced manufacturing production tax credit, originally meant for clean energy projects, to include metallurgical coal. Met coal is used in steelmaking and is treated differently than thermal coal by being processed into coke, but it is still a major source of carbon pollution. The provision redefines what qualifies as a “critical mineral” used in clean energy components, a term that was originally meant for substances like lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements that are used in solar panels and electric vehicle batteries. The change will benefit met coal producers, possibly including a firm controlled by the family of West Virginia Republican Sen. Jim Justice called Bluestone Resources, a major met coal producer. According to his financial disclosure, Justice has a stake worth more than $50 million in the company.

Winner: Oil And Gas Drillers

In a major victory for the fossil fuel industry, the Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill will shield some oil and gas companies from the corporate alternative minimum tax, potentially eliminating outright the tax bills of some of the country’s largest and most profitable drillers. The language directs the IRS to factor “intangible drilling costs” related to the exploration and development of oil and gas when determining corporate alternative minimum tax liabilities. It will significantly lower the “book profits” used to assess if a company owes the 15% minimum corporate tax, effectively gutting it for oil and gas producers. The tax carveout has been a top priority of the American Petroleum Institute, a massive industry lobbying group with member companies including giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron. It was inserted into the Senate version of the reconciliation bill by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), a longtime ally of the industry whose top career industry donor is oil and gas, according to OpenSecrets. The language mirrors a bill Lankford proposed in January called the Promoting Domestic Energy Production Act, which has been the subject of favorable lobbying by API, the American Exploration and Production Council, Ovintiv, Civitas Resources, and ConocoPhillips, according to Senate records.

Winner: Billionaire Space Company Owners

Tucked into the latest Senate version of the bill is a new tax break for the space industry that allows spaceports to qualify for tax-exempt “exempt facility bonds,” a public financing tool generally used for public infrastructure projects like airports. Spaceports are defined as facilities close to a launch site that are used to manufacture, assemble, or repair spacecraft, or used for flight control operations. The provision will allow companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to benefit from tax-exempt municipal bonds, essentially giving them access to subsidized public finance for private space projects.

Winner: Private Prisons

Private prison operators will get a $45 billion funding boost for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers over four years under the bill. The money will flow to private contractors like GEO Group and CoreCivic, both major donors to Trump’s inauguration and the GOP. In an earnings call last year, GEO Group President Wayne Calabrese said the company had been communicating to ICE that it was prepared to quickly expand its detention capacity if given the funding. “We have assured ICE of our capability to rapidly scale up our capabilities to monitor and oversee several hundreds of thousands, or even several millions of individuals in order to achieve the federal government's immigration law compliance objectives," Calabrese reportedly said.

Winner: Gun and Silencer Manufacturers

One strange provision in the bill is the elimination of the $200 federal tax to purchase firearm silencers and short-barrel rifles under the 1934 National Firearms Act. Both silencers and short-barrel rifles are regulated under the law because of how they make firearms more concealable and harder to trace, making them useful for certain types of crime. The move has been a top priority for gun rights groups and firearm manufacturers, who have lobbied through the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the American Suppressor Association to roll back the restrictions. In the Senate, the measure was pushed by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who secured its inclusion after benefiting from nearly $400,000 of NRA Victory Fund spending during his most recent election. Cornyn has also received at least $345,000 in campaign contributions from gun rights interests, making him the fourth-highest recipient in Congress as of a 2022 OpenSecrets analysis.

Winner: Wall Street Investment Firms

Section 899 of both the House and Senate versions of the bill, dubbed the “revenge tax,” would have raised taxes on inbound foreign investment from countries that tax U.S. companies unfairly, but it was scrapped last month after a Wall Street lobbying push. The Investment Company Institute, a Wall Street lobbying group representing firms like PIMCO and T. Rowe Price, argued it would scare off foreign investments in U.S. markets. Ultimately, the Wall Street voices won and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent cut a deal with OECD countries to keep a global tax agreement, prompting Republican congressional leaders to cut it.

Winner: The Defense Industry

The bill includes a more than $150 billion boost in defense spending, much of which will go to giant defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, including $25 billion for Trump’s “Golden Dome” space-based missile defense system. SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril—companies run by powerful Trump supporters—are reportedly the frontrunners to win contracts to build out the system. The “Golden Dome” project’s potential for skyrocketing costs led it to be slammed as a “gold-plated boondoggle” by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and the Congressional Budget Office put one initial estimate at $831 billion for the system over two decades.

Winner: The Semiconductor Industry

The Senate version of the bill ramps up support for semiconductor companies by expanding the Advanced Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit, an incentive created by the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, from 25% to 30% for qualified investments in advanced manufacturing facilities. Major fabless chip designers like Intel, Micron, and Global Foundries stand to benefit from this expansion, which is intended to solidify the dominance of American chip manufacturers.

Winner: Hedge Fund and Private Equity Managers

Back in February, Trump said that he wanted to end a tax loophole for private equity and hedge fund investment managers known as the “carried interest loophole” that lets them pay the same lower capital gains rates on their compensation that actual investors pay. But even though congressional Republicans were scrounging for revenue to offset the costs of the megabill, both the House and Senate versions did not address the “carried interest” preferential tax treatment. The CBO projected that leaving the loophole in place would increase the deficit by $13 billion over ten years; just one high-powered industry trade group, the American Investment Council, spent nearly three quarters of a million dollars in the first quarter lobbying on carried interest and other topics.

Loser: Big Tech and A.I. Industry

Tech giants Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta lobbied in favor of a controversial provision in the House-passed version of the megabill that would have prohibited state attempts to regulate A.I. for a decade, according to the Financial Times. A group called the A.I. Competition Center, formed last year by a Big Tech-funded trade group, argued to lawmakers that regulation would cause the U.S. to be outpaced by China. Trump megadonor Marc Andreessen, joined by artificial intelligence firms OpenAI and Anduril, also lobbied intensely for the A.I. moratorium that the House included in its legislative package. In the Senate, though, the provision was struck in a 99-1 overnight vote before the chamber passed the reconciliation bill.

To push the megabill through the Senate, deep-pocketed conservative advocacy groups spread out at least $8.2 million in ad buys across congressional districts, according to research last month from the watchdog group AccountableUS. At the end of May, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced a “comprehensive advocacy blitz” promoting the bill’s tax policies after the House passed its version, and the “dark money” group American Action Network planned a $4.2 million ad buy after being bankrolled with millions of dollars from lobbying groups like PhRMA in recent years. Those campaigns are on top of the nearly $19.8 million that the Chamber spent lobbying the government in the first quarter of this year, making it the top overall lobbying spender in Washington, D.C. The group’s disclosures mentioned lobbying on the expiration of tax provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act among scores of other issues.