7 Overlooked Provisions in Trump and the GOP’s Ugly Tax Bill
Over the Fourth of July weekend, President Donald Trump signed the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” into law. You’ve probably heard that it contains deep cuts to Medicaid spending and other social safety net programs, and that millions of people are expected to lose their health insurance. It’s no secret that the sprawling policy package enshrines and expands huge tax cuts for the wealthy and provides billions to supercharge the administration’s campaign of mass deportation. But the bill is more than 900 pages long, and the top-lines items barely manage to scratch the surface of its contents.
Underneath its attacks the poor and working class, the “Big Beautiful Bill” is packed to the gills with handouts to the ultra-rich, boons to special interest groups, and checkbox provisions for corporations and lobbyists. Here are some of the provisions in Trump’s not-so-beautiful bill you may not have seen in the headlines, but that stand to reshape America’s economic landscape in Trump and the GOP’s image.
It makes private jets tax deductible
You can tell a lot about the priorities of a tax law by looking at which provisions are temporary and which are permanent. Trump’s tax break on tips? That ends in 2028. A tax break for buying private jets? That’s now permanent.
Trump’s first-term tax bill passed in 2017 created rules for “bonus depreciation.” Tax law generally allows business owners to write off a portion of their large-scale investments in things like factories as those facilities age and depreciate, or become less valuable. The 2017 bill sought to goose spending and investment by allowing business to write off the full value of “short-lived” investments in the first year. The covered investments included not only factory machinery and farm equipment that could arguably boost productivity and stimulate the economy but also, notoriously, private jets for corporate executives.
The bonus depreciation tax provisions of the 2017 bill were in the process of being phased out and set to expire entirely in 2027. With Trump’s big bill, they’re not only back — but they’ve been made a permanent feature of the tax code.
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Flying magazine touts Trump’s new tax law as “a paradigm shift for aircraft ownership economics,” noting that “the ability to immediately deduct the full purchase price creates powerful incentives for acquisition.” FlyingUSA is even more effusive in its hype of the bonus depreciation provision: “Think of it as the VIP lounge of the tax code — exclusive, plush, and surprisingly generous.”
It caps student loans
Republicans have long opposed the student loan forgiveness initiatives piloted by the Biden administration. For all their bloviating about higher education becoming too expensive, inaccessible, and out of touch, the “Big Beautiful Bill” doesn’t actually address the college affordability crisis so much as penalize those who try to get it.
The bill places limits on how much students can borrow from the federal government in order to pay for graduate education, implementing a lifetime cap of $100,000 (and $25,000 per year) on most graduate students, and $200,000 ($50,000 a year) for professional degrees like medicine and law. The limit is a little absurd given that the median cost of a four-year medical degree in 2025 is around $286,454 for in-state students and $390,848 for private universities.
While Republicans argue that borrowing limits will prevent universities from overcharging students, education experts say that until tuition prices are significantly reduced, the cumulative effect of the policy will be to price out lower-income students. The bill also reduces the amount of repayment options for students taking out loans when the legislation goes into effect next year to just two: a standard plan, and an income-based plan.
“The changes will severely limit the number of individuals that can afford a medical degree,” American Medical Association CEO Dr. James Madara told The Latin Times, “and [will] likely exacerbate the looming shortage of physicians.”
It further limits drug-pricing negotiations
Trump’s bill includes a carveout for Big Pharma that will place new limits on the ability of Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices for the public.
The bill exempts drugs treating multiple rare conditions from price constraints, and it will let drugmakers pocket $5 billion that might otherwise have been saved by taxpayers. The Biden-era law that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices already exempted pharmaceuticals for rare diseases, defined as affecting fewer than 200,000 individuals. The new provision will exempt drugs approved to treat multiple rare diseases, according to The New York Times.
Medicare’s price negotiating is already weak, applying to a limited set of drugs for which the federal health insurance system for seniors establishes a “maximum fair price.” In practice, that negotiated price is still about three times higher than prices negotiated by other developed countries for the drugs. The logic of exempting drugs for low-incidence conditions from negotiation is also strained, simply as a question of economics. These drugs are already very profitable: A recent survey found that 19 of the 100 drugs with the highest revenues in the U.S. treat just these kinds of rare conditions.
It places a moratorium on nursing home staffing standards
The bill’s deep cuts to Medicaid are already expected to negatively impact nursing homes and Medicaid-funded elderly patient care, but other provisions in the GOP’s reconciliation bill may have devastating effects on quality of care for American seniors.
The bill places a 10-year delay on the implementation of Biden-era federal rules governing minimum staffing requirements at long-term care facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding. In a boon to nursing home administrators, Republicans put a decade-long break on Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)-approved rules that would have required long term care facilities to — among other things — increase the amount of staff on-site per patient. The new rules were implemented in response to catastrophic losses of life in American nursing homes during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In April, a federal judge sided with health care industry lobbyists and tossed out key parts of the Biden-era rules rules, and the “Big Beautiful Bill” represents a second mortal wound to post-Covid efforts to improve quality of care for long-term residential patients.
It institutionalizes DOGE-esque “government efficiency”
Elon Musk has departed the Trump White House, and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has receded from the headlines. But Trump’s bill includes a disturbing line item for the White House Office of Management and Budget, providing $100 million “for the purposes of finding budget and accounting efficiencies in the executive branch,” according to the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank.
OMB is headed up by Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025. In the early days of the administration, Vought joined with Musk in a campaign to send congressionally authorized agencies through the proverbial woodchipper. Vought put himself in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which he has tried to destroy from the inside out, halting enforcement efforts, abandoning settlements, and attempting to slash staff at the agency responsible for punishing financial bad actors, returning nearly $20 billion to scammed consumers. He’s been repeatedly slapped down by judges.
Vought has also led administration efforts to “impound” (or not spend) funds appropriated by Congress, an exercise of the power of the purse by the executive branch that’s constitutionally dubious at best. According to the analysis from CAP, the “$100 million slush fund” could “hypercharge” Vought’s DOGE-y mission “further imperiling everyday Americans.”
It puts money toward getting rid of the IRS’ free filing program
Doing your taxes is already incredibly annoying and needlessly frustrating. Tax preparation companies have devised a system to milk Americans attempting to comply with a legally mandated process for every cent they can. Trump’s signature legislation will not simplify the tax code into something that is manageable for those without a paid accountant, but take steps to eliminate one of the only fully free alternatives to for-profit services like Intuit TurboTax and H&R Block.
The House version of the legislation attempted to outright eliminate the Internal Revenue Service’s “Direct File” program — a pilot program that provides free tax-filing services to qualifying individuals in over two dozen states. The Senate softened the language only slightly, instead creating and funding a task force that would investigate how to eliminate Direct File and replace it with public-private partnership.
Tax software companies have been clamoring for the death of Direct File for some time now. According to an April report from NOTUS, Intuit spent $3.7 million lobbying the federal government in 2024. The majority of Americans support the creation of free and easy options to file their taxes directly to the IRS — and cutting out profit hungry middlemen — but this bill wasn’t ever about public welfare.
It gives oil drillers a greasy deal
There’s no shortage of favors to the oil and gas industry in Trump’s bill, in keeping with his “drill, drill, drill” agenda. That includes a mandate to resume and accelerate oil and gas leasing (both offshore and on land) from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska. It also includes a sweetheart tax deal for drillers, thanks to Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), allowing them to use deductions to wipe out what’s supposed to be a must-pay corporate tax.
The Inflation Reduction Act imposed a 15 percent “alternative minimum tax” on large corporations in 2022. The idea was to keep big companies from using complex accounting tricks and IRS loopholes to zero out taxes while simultaneously reporting high profits to shareholders.
The senator from Oklahoma, one of the leading oil states in the nation, reportedly tacked on an amendment to Trump’s bill that lets oil and gas corporations skirt this “minimum tax” by making it subject to the drilling industry’s favorite loophole. These companies will now be able to deduct “intangible drilling and development costs” — a subsidy to the industry since 1913 — before calculating their book profits subject to the minimum tax.
The new giveaway is estimated to be worth $1.1 billion.