CNN
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President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which he signed into law this month, includes major wins for business interests that carried out aggressive lobbying campaigns on Capitol Hill to secure favorable treatment for their industries.
The roughly 900-page law is the centerpiece of Trump’s second-term domestic agenda, with tax cuts for high-income earners, plus about $170 billion in new funds for immigration enforcement and mass deportations, while cutting other spending, including on Medicaid.
An array of special interests raced to shape the legislation — carving out tax breaks for private jets, excluding potentially life-saving drugs from negotiations that would lower costs, and giving two of the world’s richest men a tax windfall for their space companies.
But not everyone got what they wanted. Some provisions were thwarted by public outrage, or by the byzantine budget rules that dictated how the Republicans who narrowly control Congress could move the measure through both chambers without Democratic support.
Still, the lobbying isn’t over. Groups whose top priorities were left behind, like health care and tax prep companies, are vowing to make another run at Congress in the months ahead.
Here’s a breakdown of key provisions that were tucked into the massive law, how lobbyists successfully pushed for their inclusion, and how some interest groups still fell short.
The megabill is expected to boost sales of private planes by allowing businesses to immediately write off the entire cost of an aircraft during the first year of ownership.
Federal tax laws historically required businesses to spread out their deductions on big investments like machinery and planes over several years as the assets depreciate. Trump’s signature tax law from his first term allowed the immediate write-off, known as 100% bonus depreciation or full expensing. But it was set to phase out by 2027.
The law Trump signed this month restores the immediate tax deduction and makes it permanent, following lobbying campaigns from a range of interests, including the business aviation industry and powerhouse groups like the National Association of Manufacturers, which sought the provision so its members could use the deduction to buy factory equipment.
Charles Crain, the managing vice president of policy at the manufacturer’s group, told CNN that making the deduction permanent was one of the association’s “very top priorities.”
And Dan Hubbard, a spokesman for the 11,000-member National Business Aviation Association, said it was not a hard sell in Congress, which was receptive on the issue.
“There are businesses who are using an airplane in every state and in many, many congressional districts,” Hubbard said of the companies in his trade group.
To qualify for the special deduction, private planes must be used for business purposes at least half the time. But critics — including comedian Jon Stewart, who lampooned the tax break on his show — have argued that it’s a taxpayer-funded giveaway to the uber-wealthy.
“We’re essentially, as a society, subsidizing private jet travel,” said Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies.
Tax-free space bonds for Bezos and Musk?
Another provision aims to turbocharge investment in rocket launch facilities by allowing developers to use tax-exempt bonds to fuel the construction and expansion of spaceports.
The provision is a huge win for the commercial space industry and, perhaps, its billionaire moguls. Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the tax-writing committee, said the tax breaks were Trump’s “gift” to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.
Those companies stand to benefit from the estimated $1 billion tax break. But it was actually Space Florida, a quasi-public authority funded by the state’s government, that has been pushing for this policy for “nearly a decade,” according to the group’s CEO, Rob Long.
Florida is home to the world’s busiest spaceport, including NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The area is in the midst of a revitalization as newer commercial companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin have taken over decades-old, government-managed launchpads.
Some saw the new rules as a way to cement US domination in space. A source familiar with the lobbying effort said former GOP Rep. Michael Gallagher, a China hawk, was among the first to back the policy. It gained traction last year when GOP Rep. Neal Dunn, who used to serve on Space Florida’s board of directors, introduced the tax breaks in a standalone bill.
The bill got bipartisan backing — in part because there are launch facilities in Democratic strongholds like New Mexico and California. States that build new sites in the future would benefit, too. The standalone legislation was later folded into the megabill.
Wins for Big Pharma and rare disease groups
Certain drugmakers and rare disease advocacy groups scored a big win in the package.
Lawmakers expanded the “orphan drug” provision — which affects medications that treat diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 people — in Medicare’s drug price negotiation program, which was created by President Joe Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act.
The measure will make more of these drugs ineligible for price-negotiation for a longer period of time. Supporters of the measure say this gives drugmakers more incentive to develop such medications, but opponents say it could keep prices high for patients.
The pharmaceutical industry and patient groups have pointed to research showing that after Biden’s law, there was a drop in research and development of rare disease drugs.
“We’ve literally done hundreds of meetings with members of Congress and their staffs,” said one rare disease advocate, who described their years of lobbying for the provision.
While the House included the provision in its version of the megabill, the Senate did not initially. Proponents ramped up their outreach to senators, who restored it in the final text.
John Crowley, CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, an industry group, said in a statement that the new law is “a major, life-saving victory for rare disease patients too often overlooked by our society.”
But not everyone cheered the measure’s inclusion in the bill. Patients for Affordable Drugs Now, an advocacy group, called it a $5 billion giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry and its allies. The group said its own patient-advocates sent more than 23,000 letters and made 2,000 calls to lawmakers to urge them not to incorporate the provision into the megabill.
“Anything that undermines the power of the Medicare negotiation program is not a win for patients,” the group’s executive director Merith Basey told CNN.
The legislation contained a mini “farm bill,” delivering on an enormous priority for farmers, ranchers and commodity growers by increasing subsidy rates that were last set in 2018.
“We were at a critical time, and way past due for a farm bill,” said Philip Edwards, president of Southern Cotton Growers, which lobbied for the provisions. “The agriculture industry is feeling an awful lot of pain. Our backs are pretty much up against the wall, financially. The bill may not have been perfect, but it addressed a lot of things we needed.”
Edwards said he and allied agriculture groups sent members to Capitol Hill for a final lobbying push in March. They got bipartisan support, he said, even though Democrats made clear they couldn’t vote for Trump’s megabill even if they liked the farm provisions.
The White House’s list of endorsements highlights praise from trade groups involved in beef, chicken, dairy products, corn, wheat, barley, beans, peanuts, lentils and potatoes.
One of the most controversial provisions — which was ultimately dropped — would have banned states from enforcing any regulations regarding artificial intelligence for 10 years.
Supporters in the AI industry claimed a moratorium would’ve given breathing room to American companies, so they could innovate and compete with China, instead of trying to adhere to a patchwork of contradictory state laws. But detractors saw it as a massive giveaway to powerful Big Tech firms in a fast-evolving space that’s already underregulated.
The House passed its version of the megabill on May 22, containing the AI provision. The moratorium was swiftly condemned by a bipartisan coalition of state lawmakers, 40 state attorneys general, Democrats who already opposed the bill, labor unions and academics, MAGA influencer Steve Bannon, podcaster Joe Rogan and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
“A lot of insiders weren’t aware of the AI moratorium going into the bill until they saw it in the House text,” a source familiar with the legislative process told CNN. “Then it went viral in a way that surprised a lot of people.”
Despite the backlash, GOP Sen. Ted Cruz shepherded the moratorium through the arcane Senate review process that strips out non-budgetary items. He also cut a deal with Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican who has championed child online safety, to shorten the moratorium to five years and to let states enforce some existing AI laws.
But within 24 hours, and amid further criticism, Blackburn walked away from her own compromise deal. The Senate voted 99-1 to remove the moratorium from the final text.
“There wasn’t a lot of whipping to build support, and civil society groups had a month and a half to organize against it,” the source said. “There was a powerful force working against it. A lot of public pressure. Now, there’s a lot of hurt feelings, because folks went all-in.”
The tax prep industry nearly got a colossal victory by killing the Internal Revenue Service’s free tax-filing program known as Direct File, which the Trump administration wants to end.
Direct File is popular among users in the 25 states where it has been rolled out, but it’s still in a pilot phase. It was launched under Biden and has been touted by Democrats, who say it takes power away from tax prep companies that prey on taxpayers.
The House-passed bill included language terminating the program, after successful lobbying efforts from groups tied to tax prep companies. But Democrats then challenged that provision with the Senate parliamentarian, and Republicans agreed to drop it.
“We would’ve been happier” with the House version, “but because of the Senate rules, that wasn’t included,” said David Ransom, a veteran tax lobbyist who represents an alliance of tax prep companies that want to end Direct File, including H&R Block and TurboTax.
But the Senate version, which Trump signed into law, set aside $15 million for the Treasury Department to study how to wind down Direct File or replace it with something better. And Ransom said the tax prep industry is optimistic that this will lead to the end of Direct File.
One provision that didn’t make it into the final law, despite intense lobbying, would have enacted long-discussed reforms to pharmacy benefit managers’ practices in Medicaid.
In the House-passed megabill, Congress was set to require PBMs, as these middlemen between drugmakers and insurers are known, to reimburse pharmacies at a rate that reflects the cost of the medications. The provision would have also prohibited so-called spread pricing, which allows some PBMs to make money by charging Medicaid a higher amount for the drugs than they reimburse the pharmacies, while pocketing the difference.
Pharmacies and others have long pushed lawmakers to enact PBM reform, claiming the middlemen don’t fairly compensate them for the cost of drugs, putting some pharmacists out of business. (The measure was nearly enacted last December as part of a bipartisan government funding package that was torpedoed at the last minute by Trump and Musk.)
The PBM industry’s main lobbying group, the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, said these provisions would’ve “given Big Pharma an unprecedented windfall.”
During the Senate parliamentarian’s review of the House bill, the provision was removed.
The National Association of Chain Drug Stores, which supported the scrapped provision, is already running TV ads in the Washington, DC, market calling on lawmakers to include the reforms in future legislation. A new bipartisan bill was proposed in the House last week.
“The work is already done. … It’s time to move this,” said Chris Krese, the group’s senior vice president for congressional relations.
The gambling industry, which lobbied around the bill, is now trying to repeal one key item.
In a May 6 letters to lawmaker that was obtained by CNN, the American Gaming Association spelled out its priorities, including upholding a longstanding federal tax policy that allows gamblers to deduct 100% of gambling losses up to the amount of winnings.
The House bill included that request. But the Senate changed the policy at the 11th hour to comply with the budgetary rules, and lowered the deductible amount to 90% of losses.
This outraged the professional gambling community, and experts argued that it would force gamblers to pay taxes on “phantom” winnings that were later eclipsed by larger losses.
Industry groups raised another issue with the bill, according to a June 25 letter to Congress obtained by CNN: A so-called “revenge tax” that would’ve hiked taxes on some income earned in the US by foreigners from countries with taxes that the US believes are unfair.
The American Gaming Association claimed that the provision would have “a very chilling effect” on table games like blackjack or roulette because it would force casinos to start asking for identification from anyone who sits down to play, to check their nationality.
Wall Street and global business leaders also wanted it removed. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a deal to remove the provision before the bill was finalized.
The new tax on casino winnings stood, however, and now a group of lawmakers are trying to reverse it before it takes effect in January, with Nevada Democrats taking the lead. But last week, an initial attempt to repeal the provision was blocked by a Republican senator.
This article has been updated with additional information.
