House Passes Tax Cuts for Businesses, Low-Income Families

The House passed a bipartisan tax-cut bill that would deliver billions of dollars to companies and low-income families, overcoming election-year inertia and a series of objections from lawmakers in both parties.

The 357-70 vote late Wednesday pleased many business groups, antiabortion conservatives and progressive antipoverty advocates.

Republicans voted 169-47 for the bill, while Democrats backed it by a 188-23 margin.

“It speaks for itself. The Senate needs to pick up the bill and pass it as it is,” the bill’s author, Rep. Jason Smith (R., Mo.), said. “We did it in 15 days. Surely, they can do it in 15 days.”

But that broad coalition that Smith and Democrats assembled now faces tough sledding in the Senate. Republicans there have been lukewarm about the deal negotiated by Smith, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

The business and child tax credit changes would all last through 2025, aligning their expiration with the bulk of the tax cuts from the 2017 law and setting up a giant tax bill next year.

The bill would also shut down the employee-retention tax credit, a pandemic-era program that has been filled with fraud and ineligible claims, according to the IRS. The bill would prevent the IRS from paying claims filed after Wednesday, accelerating deadlines that otherwise would have stretched as late as April 2025.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and the White House all support the bill, a rare bipartisan alignment in this closely divided and unproductive Congress.

“It’s not perfection,” said Rep. Richard Neal (D., Mass.), the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee. “It’s not what I would have written. But this is a decent tax package to go forward.”

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