Charles Koch would benefit massively if Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are made permanent—but his cronies want you to believe it’d be good for all Americans. David Zalubowski/AP
A group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers is on a mission: to extend the massive tax cuts Trump instituted in his first term, and to convince working-class Americans that those cuts benefit them, too—despite ample evidence to the contrary.
According to an eight-page memo obtained by the Guardian, Americans for Prosperity (AFP)—a dark-money group founded in 2004 by Charles Koch and his brother David, who died in 2019—is trying to preserve and expand the $1.5 trillion Republican tax cuts from 2017, many of which are supposed to expire at the end of this year. “We will be seeking a further reduction in corporate taxes,” the AFP memo to donors states, noting that domestic corporate revenue increased 41 percent, to $420 billion, from 2017 to 2023.
The group is also trying to pressure members of Congress to use the Congressional Review Act—which gives Congress 60 days to overturn agencies’ proposed new rules—to undo regulations implemented at the end of Biden’s term focused on the technology and energy sectors (the memo does not offer further details on the specific regulations they’re targeting).
The memo does not state the total estimated cost of AFP’s lobbying efforts, but the Guardian reports a figure of $20 million.
Its aims are audacious, considering that there is already evidence that the 2017 tax cuts did not benefit working-class Americans, but the ultra-wealthy. As my colleague Hannah Levintova wrote in 2018:
In the year since the GOP Congress helped Trump push through his $1.5 trillion in cuts in less than two months, businesses have not, as promised, overwhelmingly given their extra profits back to the people. Instead, they’ve saved billions in taxes, using the money for stock buybacks aimed at further enriching the company’s executives and shareholders, driven the federal debt to a level unseen since the years immediately after the Great Recession, and overwhelmingly kept any plans for spending their massive tax savings a secret.
And as my colleague Michael Mechanic noted back in October, the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy released an analysis of whom Trump’s most recent tax proposals would benefit. Their findings? The proposals would lead to tax increases for all but the richest 5 percent of Americans, with the poorest Americans seeing the largest increase. Another analysis conducted in May 2023 by the same group found that making the provisions permanent (through a bill proposed by Republicans that year) would cost $288.5 billion next year alone—two-thirds of which would go to the richest Americans, with the poorest fifth receiving only 1 percent of the spoils.
But AFP seems undeterred by existing evidence—and, instead, is committed to producing its own.
The memo reported by the Guardian says the group will rely on a three-pronged strategy to achieve its goals: Spending at least $10 million to build a “national narrative” focused on “telling the success story of tax cuts” and countering what it calls “inevitable class-warfare arguments” against them; carrying out a lobbying campaign in Washington; and “lighting a grassroots fire back home” to persuade lawmakers in the House and Senate to act.
Some of these efforts will specifically target Latino voters, given the gains Trump made with them in the November election, according to the memo—which adds that a self-described center-right New Mexico nonprofit called the LIBRE Initiative, part of the wider Koch network, is launching a “national grassroots program to rally Latino Americans to support the extension of the tax cuts along with the repeal of recent costly Biden Administration.” That effort already appears to be underway: The group has shared infographics praising the 2017 legislation to its tens of thousands of social media followers and launched a website directing people to send letters to their members of Congress demanding that they expand the tax cuts.
Another key player in the strategy will apparently be Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which the memo describes as “as a real opportunity to cut over-regulation and waste.” (As Michael Mechanic outlined last month, while the DOGE proposals include eliminating the National Institutes of Health, veterans’ health benefits, and Pell Grants, there are a variety of tax breaks the government could roll back if it were actually concerned with cutting wasteful spending.)
The AFP group points to its success getting the 2017 bill passed, and their “door-to-door, phone, and digital lobbying efforts” to get Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—confirmed to the bench as proof of their ability to rally support. “At a time when many Senators were under intense pressure from progressives to cave,” they write, “AFP activists were the critical counterweights to outside progressive influences.”
One person who definitely will benefit if the tax cuts are extended? Charles Koch. In 2018, the liberal group Americans for Tax Fairness estimated that the tax cuts would save the Koch brothers an estimated $1 billion a year in income taxes.