How a tax package comes together in 2025 when a swath of provisions from the GOP’s tax law expire will depend on the cost estimates and analyses coming out of Congress’s scorekeeper, the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Love it or hate it, a “score” of how much a tax bill will cost or raise from the nearly 70-person office down the street from the US Capitol can make or break legislation.
And members don’t always like what JCT has to say. Longtime Chief of Staff Tom Barthold said in an interview he hasn’t taken it personally when lawmakers have yelled, and said the staff take their reputation for objectivity seriously.
“Everybody on staff thinks about it,” Barthold said. “We emphasize that we’re trying to treat everybody fairly.”
The JCT has played a pivotal role in all the major tax legislation enacted since the body’s inception nearly 100 years ago, and that won’t change in 2025, regardless of who comes out on top in the November election.
“They’re really the ones that are going to be guiding the process, especially when this is going to be heavily dependent on revenue,” said Jennifer Acuña, a principal at KPMG’s Federal Legislative & Regulatory Services group and former GOP chief tax counsel for the Senate Finance Committee.
With so many new members and staffers on the tax committees, the tenured JCT staff’s expertise and perspectives on policy is vital heading into 2025, former staffers said.
That work is expected to intensify. With upcoming retirements, the committee is hiring to ensure JCT is fully staffed, Barthold said.
His staff has already been busy this year as lawmakers explore different options for what to do next year, he said, adding that work will intensify after the election.
“They won’t be getting much sleep for the next year, I would imagine,” former Ways and Means Chair Kevin Brady (R-Texas) said in an interview. “Come November, certainly January, it will be all hands on deck.”
Revenue, Reconciliation
While other think tanks and researchers will put out their own scores, nothing means as much as one from the JCT. It’s the one with access to actual tax return information.
Any lawmaker can request a revenue estimate for a tax proposal. In 2013, JCT received the largest number of requests to date: 8,612. Since 2013, the number of requests has varied between around 2,000 and 7,000, according to JCT.
“JCT, they’ve always had a stellar reputation in this city,” House Ways and Means ranking member Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said. “They are honest brokers. The numbers don’t lie.”
Former tax staffers said they relied heavily on and met often with JCT through the drafting of bills, such as what became the 2017 tax law. JCT’s feedback would sometimes mean House Ways and Means or Senate Finance staff end up going back to the drawing board, some said.
In years before the 2017 tax law, former GOP leadership and tax staffer George Callas said they had drafting sessions several times a week.
“It’s a hand-in-glove relationship between the tax-writing committee staff and the JCT staff,” said Callas, who’s now at Arnold Ventures. “Figuring out how to pay for it, and design and draft all the pay-fors, that’s 99% of the work, and so that’s where they’re indispensable.”
The need for revenue to offset at least some of the tax breaks’ price tag is expected to drive next year’s tax bill, whether government is divided or controlled by one party, Acuña said. JCT’s role is amplified, though, if lawmakers have single-party control and decide to pass a tax bill through the reconciliation process as the GOP did in 2017.
In reconciliation, a party can pass a bill with a simple majority but must meet certain budgetary constraints.
That’s “because every line item in the bill has to have a revenue impact in order for it to meet the rules of reconciliation,” Acuña said.
Former Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), a retired Ways and Means member now at Arnold and Porter, said that JCT staff is adept at rising above politics.
“Given where they come down on a particular issue, they get some blowback from time to time, and that’s just natural, where members may not like where they’re coming down on a particular analysis,” Kind said. .
Barthold is JCT’s second-longest serving chief of staff, behind Colin Stam, who led the committee during the codification of the tax code from 1937 to 1964. Barthold has been chief of staff for a little over 15 years, and said he won’t be trying to catch Stam’s record.
Dynamic Scoring
Republicans may also require a “dynamic” analysis of a 2025 tax bill, which they did in 2017. That means JCT must account for the impact on some macroeconomic measures, like employment and gross domestic product.
That type of analysis has been a point of controversy for over two decades, according to the Congressional Research Service. In 2015 and in 2023, the House adopted a rule mandating the Congressional Budget Office and JCT to include macroeconomic feedback in official scores of major legislation or if certain lawmakers request it.
Whether the method is mandated that same way in 2025 will depend on who controls Congress. It would be a key tool for Republicans to address concerns about the cost of the tax cuts.
“I believe dynamic scoring is imperative,” said Senate Finance ranking member Mike Crapo (R-Idaho). “I believe pro-growth tax policy doesn’t need to be offset.”
Democrats have blasted the idea, calling it “voodoo economics” that Republicans use to get around deficit concerns. The conventional model JCT uses for scoring also incorporates behavioral changes, Democrats have noted.
“My Republican friends will do absolutely anything they can to justify their budget-busting tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires,” House Budget Committee ranking member Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) said earlier this summer.
Boyle added that any dynamic scoring methods should be used for policies like the child tax credit.
Barthold noted that JCT developed the modeling capability in the 1990s, and had models in place in the decade before 2015 to give members a range of outcomes. In 2015, that shifted from providing the range of possibilities to a point estimate, he said.
Lessons from 2017
Dynamic estimates for the 2017 tax law found that the tax cuts would add $1.1 trillion over 10 years, versus the $1.5 trillion estimate found using conventional scoring.
Mark Prater, a former GOP chief tax counsel now a managing director at Pricewaterhouse Coopers,said the dynamic scoring analysis was useful in answering some questions on how the bill would impact base erosion and profit shifting.
At the time, Neal noted that the analysis found that “even under the most generously optimistic economic conditions, tax cuts do not pay for themselves.”
Backlash over these types of analyses aren’t new to the JCT, and will likely come up again in 2025. The same issues were present even back in 2003, when the House required a similar dynamic estimates rule.
“There was a lot of controversy at the time, because there was a lot of pressure coming out of some members of Congress to do those estimates,” said George Yin, who served as the JCT chief of staff from 2003 to 2005.
That’s part of the job, though, Yin added.
“Congress is always going to yell and scream no matter what you do, so even if you do a good job, they’re going to yell and scream because they don’t like the result you came up with. That’s just the nature of the game.”
Barthold said he hopes lawmakers don’t run out the clock on next year’s tax negotiations. He harkened back to 2012, when Congress returned from Christmas break to wrap up the tax bill and ring in the New Year.
“I’m just hoping in some ways that it’s not like 2012 and 2013, when we were working until midnight on Dec. 31.”
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