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The Beginnings Of The One Big Beautiful Bill Act: Placing The 2017 Tax Cuts And Jobs Act In Historical Perspective

Amanda Borwegen & Ajay K. Mehrotra

J.D. 2025, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law; B.A. 2019, Washington & Jefferson College. Stanford Clinton Sr. and Zylpha Kilbride Clinton Research Professor of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law; Affiliated Professor of History, Northwestern University; and Research Professor, American Bar Foundation. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2025 American Association of Law School Conference. We thank the participants at that conference for their useful feedback, and to those colleagues and friends who reviewed and discussed drafts of this essay including Jennifer Bird-Pollan, Ari Glogower, Christopher Hanna, Andy Koppelman, Philip Postlewaite, Samy Abdelsalam, and Maggie Amen. We are grateful to Noah Taran for excellent research assistance, and to Jeena Patel and the staff of the Cornell Law Review for their assistance. All errors, of course, remain our own.

26 Feb 2026

On July 4, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). This new law was built on the foundations of its immediate predecessor,the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). This Essay examines the historical roots and contemporary implications of these two laws. It argues that both acts reflect continuities and ruptures in the recent history of U.S. tax law and fiscal policymaking. On the one hand, the two laws are a continuation of decades-long trends in American tax policy—trends marked by persistent tax cutting, increasing partisan polarization, and a growing disregard for fiscal responsibility. Yet these two laws also depart from earlier episodes marked by bipartisan efforts to address fiscal challenges through compromise and revenue-conscious reform.

To highlight the continuities and ruptures, the Essay further analyzes three key historical analogs: (1) the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, (2) the 1990s Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Acts, and (3) the 1983 Greenspan Commission on Social Security Reform. While earlier tax laws established the partisan use of reconciliation and temporary tax relief, the TCJA and OBBBA expanded this model into permanent, deficit-financed legislation. In contrast, the Omnibus Acts and Greenspan Commission exemplified bipartisan efforts to address fiscal challenges through compromise and revenue-conscious reform. 

The goal of this Essay is not to explicate the detailed provisions of the two new laws. Rather, our objective is to provide a broad retrospective look at how we have arrived at this historic and extraordinary moment. The historical trends explored in this Essay suggest that we may be entering a new era of tax law and fiscal policymaking—one defined by ideological entrenchment and legislative expediency rather than bipartisan cooperation and fiscal responsibility. By placing the TCJA in historical perspective, we identify and analyze some of the early beginnings of the OBBBA and other historical analogs, with the hope of better understanding the new law and perhaps future tax and spending legislation.

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