Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

22. Department of the Treasury · Major · Needs Congress

Cut the corporate income tax rate to 18 percent

Not started

696 22. Department of the Treasury

“The corporate income tax rate should be reduced to 18 percent. The corporate income tax is the most damaging tax in the U.S. tax system, and its primary economic burden falls on workers because capital is more mobile than labor.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The 2025 reconciliation act (Public Law 119-21) rewrote large parts of the business tax code — permanent full expensing, permanent domestic research expensing, a new international regime — but left the corporate rate in section 11(b) of the Internal Revenue Code at 21 percent. The enrolled text contains no amendment to section 11 and no rate schedule change; no bill to cut the rate to 18 percent has been reported out of committee.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The enrolled text of Public Law 119-21 was read in full from https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-119publ21/html/PLAW-119publ21.htm and searched for Section 11(, 26 USC 11, corporate tax rate and 21 percent: no hit. Title VII, Subtitle A, Chapter 3 (“Establishing Certainty and Competitiveness for American Job Creators”) changes cost recovery and international rules, not the rate.
  • No 119th-Congress bill in the Corpus carries a title naming a corporate-rate cut; the Corpus holds bill titles and latest actions only, so a rate cut buried in an untitled omnibus would not surface from titles alone. Nothing in the Federal Register or the White House presidential-actions file bears on a statutory rate — a rate change cannot be made by executive action, and the Recommendation is flagged Requires Congress.
Action
restrict
Object
corporate income tax rate
ID
1921