Proposed House tax agenda leaves millions of working families behind
From Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), updated May 19, 2025
The proposed House reconciliation bill would give huge tax breaks to wealthy individuals, businesses, and large corporations while leaving behind or raising costs for millions of working families. Here are some of the impacts:
Under the bill, the average family earning less than $50,000 would get under $300 in tax cuts in 2027, less than $1 a day, while the average tax filer earning $1 million or more a year would receive about $90,000 in tax breaks. That’s how tilted the bill is to those at the very top, with policies like an even bigger special deduction for wealthy business owners — millionaires get more than half of this break — and an estate tax-free exemption for wealthy heirs of $30 million per couple.
A significant portion of the small tax benefits going to low- and moderate-income families will be eaten up by the higher consumer costs created by President Trump’s trade tariffs. The very same day the House Ways and Means Committee acted on its tax bill, while doing nothing to stop the tariffs, Walmart announced it will soon raise prices because of the Trump tariffs.
The 17 million children who currently don’t get the full $2,000 Child Tax Credit because their families’ incomes are too low get nothingfrom the $500-per-child increase in the Child Tax Credit in the bill.(See estimates by state and race/ethnicity here; congressional district estimates here.) In total, up to 20 million children are in working familiesthat get no help at all or get less than the full $2,500 per child because they don’t earn enough.
A single parent with two children earning $16,000 a year as a home health aide would get no additional credit under the bill, while a married couple with two children earning $400,000 a year would receive an extra $1,000.
Last year, 169 House Republicans voted to expand the Child Tax Credit; that bill would have benefited the vast majority of the children left out entirely of the current House proposed expansion. At the time, Republican proponents argued that the improvements were pro-work and pro-family.
Eligibility for the Child Tax Credit would be taken away from an estimated 4.5 million citizen or legal permanent resident children under the bill’s requirement that both parents have a Social Security number, according to figures published by the Center for Migration Studies. This includes nearly 900,000 children in Texas alone. (See state and congressional district estimates here.)
This exclusion would apply to families where one parent is a citizen and the other is in the country lawfully but without a Social Security number.
About 22 million people, including 3 million small business owners, would see their health coverage costs skyrocket or would lose coverage altogether next year because the bill fails to extend the premium tax credit (PTC) enhancements, which are critical to making health coverage in the Affordable Care Act marketplace more affordable.
Without this vital extension, an estimated 4 million people will lose their health insurance when costs rise beyond what families can afford. Millions more will see their premiums increase markedly as they struggle to remain insured.
The bill also takes PTCs and Medicare away entirely from many immigrants who live and work in the U.S. lawfully. (People without a documented status are already ineligible.) Those who would be affected include people with immigration statuses designed to help people in humanitarian need, like those granted refugee or asylee status and victims of trafficking or domestic violence.
The tax provisions would cost nearly $4 trillion, even after making ill-advised cuts of over $500 billion in clean energy incentives designed to spur energy technology transformation in the U.S. The cost would grow if Republicans who are demanding an even larger tax cut for many high-income families based on the amount they pay for state and local taxes are successful.
This enormous, skewed-to-the-richest expense is driving other House committees to take away health coverage under Medicaid and food assistance under SNAP in an effort to partially offset the tax cuts’ cost. Many families who rely on Medicaid to see a doctor and on SNAP to buy groceries will lose more to cuts and tariffs than they gain from the tax cuts.