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Congress should pass H.R. 1—the tax bill—immediately, manufacturers told congressional leaders Monday.

What’s going on: The tax package delivers on the promise made by the administration and Congress “to ensure the United States leads the world in manufacturing,” the NAM and more than 300 manufacturing leaders told Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).

• The legislation extends and makes permanent the pro-growth provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which proved to be “rocket fuel” for the manufacturing industry.
• Many of the measures from the TCJA have expired, and others are scheduled to sunset at the end of this year—unless Congress acts.

What it does: H.R. 1 extends key measures from the TCJA “and builds on their success,” the NAM and its allies said. Here’s what the bill does:

• Provides tax certainty for small manufacturers: The bill “permanently extends the 20% pass-through deduction and preserves the TCJA’s individual tax rates, both of which are crucial for the 96% of small manufacturing businesses organized as pass-throughs.” It also protects small family-owned manufacturers from the estate tax.
• Supports investment and innovation: The measure restores immediate research-and-development expensing, full expensing for capital equipment purchases and an EBITDA-based interest deductibility standard.
• Bolsters American competitiveness: The bill makes the FDII, GILTI and BEAT international tax regimes permanent and preserves the 21% corporate rate.
• Incentivizes growth: H.R. 1 creates a new deduction that allows companies to immediately expense the cost of new factories and the cost of improvements to current facilities, among other moves.

The precedent: Manufacturers know the pro-growth tax policies in the legislation will work because they’ve worked before, the NAM and manufacturing leaders told the House and Senate.

• “Following passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, manufacturing in the United States secured the best year in job creation in more than two decades, the best wage growth in 15 years and impressive growth in capital spending, increasing by 4.5% in 2018 and by 5.7% in 2019.”

The cost of inaction: Failure to pass the legislation would result in a nationwide loss of 5.9 million jobs, $540 billion in wages and $1 trillion in GDP, according to a recent NAM study.

Amplifying the NAM message: The message was amplified quickly on social media by key decision makers, including the White House, Speaker Johnson and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN).

The Senate handed manufacturers a victory this week when it passed President Trump’s critical tax legislation. Now it’s time for the House to seal the deal.

What’s going on: “The Senate advanced a tax package that will strengthen small businesses, family-owned operations and manufacturing workers across the country,” NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons said today. “It drives manufacturers closer to the goal line—growing businesses, creating jobs and powering stronger communities.”

• The legislation extends, makes permanent and restores expired measures from the manufacturing-boosting 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
• President Trump has urged Congress to get the bill to his desk by Friday, July 4.

Powerful partnerships: The Senate’s passage of the bill follows months of hard work by manufacturers. Last week, the NAM and nearly 40 manufacturing leaders from across the U.S. flew to Washington for three days of high-level meetings with the White House and Congress, urging passage of the legislation.

• Manufacturers “took to Capitol Hill to make their voices heard on a critical issue: getting the tax bill to the president’s desk,” the NAM wrote in a social post shared by numerous congressional leaders and the White House’s official X account. “Hear from manufacturers on why Congress needs to act now.”

What’s next: “The House now can finish the job,” Timmons continued. “We call on our partners in the House to send this bill to the president’s desk—the strongest tax bill for manufacturers we have seen in a generation. Because when Congress champions the 13 million people who make things in America, manufacturing wins.”

For three jam-packed days this week, the NAM and 39 manufacturers from across the U.S. took to Capitol Hill to make their voices heard on a critical issue: getting the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to President Donald Trump’s desk by a July 4 deadline.

What’s going on: Manufacturing leaders from Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Indiana, South Carolina and Minnesota—representing 29 manufacturing businesses—gathered in Washington Monday to emphasize to members of the House, Senate and administration the economic stakes of inaction on the OBBBA.

• At approximately 50 meetings with decision makers on the Hill—including one with Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender—the NAM-led manufacturer contingent pointed repeatedly to  NAM data projecting the loss of 1.1 million manufacturing jobs and $284 billion in output if the OBBBA isn’t passed.
• The NAM-led visit and meetings were covered by POLITICO Pro’s Morning Tax newsletter, among other outlets.

Roundtable: The Treasury Department hosted the group Thursday morning for a roundtable discussion on the scheduled expiration of several important, pro-growth tax provisions.

• Treasury staffers sought firsthand accounts of how the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—extensions of which are in the OBBBA—helped manufacturers. They also asked for stories illustrating how the sunsetting of the TCJA measures, which began in 2022, has harmed manufacturing businesses.
• NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons thanked the administration for its continued commitment to manufacturing nationwide, adding that the real-world stories from the group and perspectives the members shared during the roundtable would help inform ongoing discussions with both Congress and the White House.

The details: During the roundtable, manufacturers detailed how the TCJA fueled capital investments, hiring, and innovation—momentum that could stall without congressional action.

• Manufacturers pointed to the critical role of provisions, including immediate research-and-development expensing, full expensing for capital equipment purchases and interest deductibility—in driving product development and facility expansion.
• Business owners hammered home the need to make these measures permanent and as beneficial as possible for manufacturers to support long-term planning and continued innovation.

Lifesaving measures: Leadership from a company in the medical technology sector noted that uncertainty in R&D expensing could delay lifesaving advancements.

• Another manufacturer, whose company makes safety equipment, described how the loss of the full expensing provisions would affect safety investments on shop floors.
• Other manufacturers highlighted post-2017 growth in facility buildouts and acquisitions that now hang in the balance thanks to uncertainty surrounding the TCJA provisions’ continuation.

Reinforcing a three-part tax policy agenda: The Treasury event reinforced the NAM’s three-part tax policy agenda, which consists of the following:

• Protecting small business incentives, such as the pass-through deduction and estate tax relief
• Restoring pro-investment provisions, such as R&D expensing and interest deductibility
• Maintaining the competitive 21% corporate tax rate and the TCJA’s international tax regime

Treasury’s take: Deputy Treasury Secretary Faulkender  spoke at length about the roundtable with Bloomberg TV.

• “We had a great conversation with Jay and a number of his members today to understand exactly how factories around this country would be impacted if we do not get this bill over the finish line, and to talk about not just the benefits we saw after the 2017 act, but some of the new provisions that are in this bill, and how it would impact the investments that they make,” Faulkender said. “We know full well failure is not an option.”

Streamlining, simplifying and reducing compliance requirements would relieve a large burden that now rests on manufacturers’ shoulders, the NAM told Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress this week.

What’s going on: “Many small and medium-sized manufacturers incur substantial costs each year to comply with the law, and particularly Section 404(b)” of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, NAM Managing Vice President Charles Crain told the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets ahead of a Wednesday hearing.

• “Striking the balance between capital formation and investor protection is a key test for any requirement that falls on smaller public companies.”
• Companies spend more than $1 million a year to comply with SOX 404(b), which requires an external audit of a company’s internal financial controls.

What Congress should do: To ease the load on smaller reporting companies—a category under which many manufacturers in the U.S. fall—Congress should consider legislation that would exempt them from SOX 404(b), the NAM said.

• Congress should also exempt all accelerated filers (companies with a public float below $700 million), as well as newly public companies, from SOX 404(b), Crain said.
• Finally, the NAM supports reforms outlined in the subcommittee’s draft legislation to update the SEC’s definition of SRCs, including raising both the maximum public float and revenue thresholds.

Introduced into the record: Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) introduced the NAM’s statement into the record and expressed support for exempting smaller companies from SOX’s costly attestation audit requirements.

NAM at the SEC: The NAM also urged the SEC to institute reporting requirement reforms related to executive compensation—a complicated and costly area of disclosure that often provides minimal investor benefit.

• “The NAM has long supported flexibility in the design of executive compensation benefit packages to ensure manufacturers can recruit and retain leaders that will grow the business, create more jobs and contribute to our overall economic growth,” Crain told the SEC ahead of a Thursday roundtable on executive compensation disclosure requirements. “Unfortunately, the SEC’s compensation rules have become too complex and have undermined that flexibility.”

What the SEC should do: The NAM laid out several steps the agency should take to ease compensation reporting requirements “to moderate the compliance burdens on public companies while reducing the number of pages and tables in a proxy statement that investors must review each year.” These include urging the SEC to take the following steps:

• Scale compensation disclosure burdens based on company size.
• Replace the disclosures required by the 2022 Pay Versus Performance rule with principles-based narrative disclosure.
• Support the repeal of the CEO pay ratio rule, “which mandates the costly determination of a company’s median employee and the collection of company-wide employee compensation data to generate disclosures that are not relevant or used by most investors.”

In a move the NAM called  “a massive triumph for manufacturing in America,” the Treasury Department on Thursday announced a deal with G-7 allies to exempt American companies from certain taxes imposed by other nations—resulting in Congress and the administration agreeing to remove from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” a U.S. tax on companies from those countries.

What’s going on: “Today’s deal is a win for manufacturing and a win for America,” said NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons. “Manufacturers have long raised concerns about the overreaching and extraterritorial nature of OECD Pillar 2.”

• Pillar 2 of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development introduces a global minimum 15% corporate tax rate, which it allows other countries to collect if companies’ home nations do not.
• Under the terms of the deal announced Thursday, Pillar 2 taxes will not apply to U.S. companies, paving the way for the elimination of the Section 899 retaliatory tax from Congress’s reconciliation bill.
• The 899 provision would have allowed the U.S. to impose retaliatory taxes on companies from countries with punitive tax policies, including the ones in the OECD regime.

What it will do: The move means manufacturers of all sizes will be relieved of the threat of damaging tax burdens, the NAM said, as domestic businesses will no longer face the threat of Pillar 2 and foreign-headquartered companies will not be impacted by Section 899.

What’s next: “It’s now time for the Senate to vote and for the House to send this bill to President Trump’s desk by July 4,” Timmons said.

The two largest, most influential proxy advisory firms in the U.S. wield outsize, harmful influence on businesses—and they need to be regulated now, the NAM said this week.

What’s going on: Together, Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis control 97% of the proxy advice market. Those firms exist to advise institutional investors on how to vote on shareholder proposals and other proxy ballot measures that come before publicly traded companies.

• The ISS/Glass “duopoly … [is insulated] from accountability—to the point where these two market players have significant conflicts of  interest and are widely recognized as offering error-filled, opaque, one-size-fits-all advice and yet they still enjoy market dominance,” NAM Managing Vice President Charles Crain told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform and Antitrust at a hearing on Wednesday.
• The firms use their dominant market position and influence over proxy vote outcomes to drive investors and companies to buy consulting, governance ratings and other related services.
• The firms remain largely unregulated despite calls for reform “and everyday people pay the price,” Crain continued.

What they do: While the voting platforms of ISS and Glass Lewis offer a legitimately helpful service—connecting investors to the back end of the proxy voting system—the firms use the platforms to steer clients toward their own voting research and recommendations.

• “They’ll even pre-fill the platform with their preferred votes and then robo-vote an investor’s shares on their behalf,” said Crain.
• Furthermore, some of the proxy firms’ guidelines (such as on equity incentive plans) are so complex and opaque that companies are effectively forced into hiring the firms’ corporate consulting arms to navigate them.
• The proxy firms have other policies—for example, they recommend for annual shareholder votes on executive compensation at companies even though Congress has said annual voting is unnecessary—that “appear designed to increase their own market power,” according to the NAM.

What should be done: Congress should pass the legislation introduced by Subcommittee Chairman Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI), the Stopping Proxy Advisor Racketeering Act, Crain said.

• The measure would bar “proxy advisory firms from issuing voting recommendations when any conflict could reasonably be expected to affect the objectivity or reliability of proxy advice, including being a member of a group that supports proposals similar to the shareholder-sponsored proposal,” according to Fitzgerald’s office.
• “[M]anufacturers support Chairman Fitzgerald’s bill,” Crain concluded because, “[m]anufacturers understand the stakes of getting this right.”

The Interior Department will begin implementing a new policy to speed up the search for and development of offshore critical minerals, it announced Wednesday.

What’s going on: “To support a more efficient and predictable offshore minerals program, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management … and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement … are updating policies across all stages of development—from early exploration to post-lease operations and production.”

• The changes are intended to cut down on delays, improve coordination and give industry more certainty—“all while upholding key environmental safeguards.”
• For early-stage exploration, BOEM plans to “apply existing streamlined environmental reviews whenever appropriate” and to extend prospecting permits’ length to five years from three.

Leasing plan details: To speed the leasing process, BOEM will identify areas for development without first issuing formal requests or forming task forces.

• This change alone could shave from two months to a year off the development times of projects, according to the agency.
• BOEM will also begin readying environmental assessments during the lease sale phase, saving the more detailed impact statements for later planning stages, if needed.
• Once a lease is issued, the BSEE and BOEM “will continue to streamline the process by considering offshore critical mineral projects for expedited permitting under the department’s emergency procedures and other applicable laws.”

Why it’s key: China dominates global critical minerals production and refining, and in the past year has greatly restricted exports of certain critical minerals vital to semiconductors, electronics and fiber optics, among other applications.

The final say: “Manufacturers have long sounded the alarm on the need for permitting reform, and this latest plan from Interior combines that priority with the pressing need to boost critical mineral supply chains,” said NAM Director of Energy and Resources Policy. 

• “Manufacturers support the administration exploring every available, feasible avenue to increase our supply of those resources and reduce our reliance on China.”

For all the alarms that have been sounded about artificial intelligence’s possible contribution to climate change, AI, it turns out, could actually help slash emissions, according to new research (POLITICO Pro, subscription).

What’s going on: “Artificial intelligence could cut global climate pollution by up to 5.4 billion metric tons a year over the next decade if it’s harnessed in ways that would improve transportation, energy and food production.”

• Those cuts “would outweigh even the expected increase in global energy consumption and emissions that would be created by” data centers, according to new research from the Grantham Research Institute that was published in the journal “npj Climate Action.”
• By 2030, data centers are projected to consume twice as much electricity as they do today, according to the International Energy Agency—and the electrical grid is already strained.

The details: The report lays out five areas where AI can be used to slash emissions, including:

• Forecasting supply and demand fluctuations and helping the grid dole out energy more accurately, cutting down on intermittency
• Improving transportation by lowering the cost of electric vehicles via battery improvements

The backdrop: The use of AI has exploded in recent years, and President Trump is making the technology a priority as he aims to outcompete China.

Yes, but … The report urges the governments of developed nations to take an active role in determining how AI is applied and regulated “to make sure the downsides are managed effectively and the full potential of AI for climate action is realized,” the study’s author, Roberta Pierfederici, told POLITICO Pro.

Members of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure should vote yes on legislation that would modernize and reform the Clean Water Act permitting process, the NAM said today.

What’s going on: The Promoting Efficient Review for Modern Infrastructure Today (PERMIT) Act “adopts the NAM’s key recommendations to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure for modernization of regulatory authorities under the Clean Water Act—reforms that are critical to manufacturers’ ability to build, expand and hire in America,” NAM Managing Vice President of Policy Charles Crain told the committee ahead of a Wednesday markup of the bill.

• “These include proposals to increase certainty for permittees and clarify the scope of the CWA.”

Why it’s needed: The permitting process for manufacturers under the Clean Water Act is unnecessarily long and onerous, jeopardizing continued American leadership in manufacturing.

• In February, Nucor Corporation Executive Vice President of Sheet Products Noah Hanners told the committee members that “cumbersome and overreaching permitting regulations are holding back progress and hurting our nation’s competitiveness .”

Case in point: In 2022, Nucor announced it had chosen a site in West Virginia for a new steel mill—but the location on the Ohio River required the company to seek federal authorization under the Clean Water Act.

• What followed was a process that “required us to work with multiple federal agencies—with little direction and unclear timelines,” Hanners said. “This led to moving targets for our own planning and execution, delaying the project and increasing costs.”

What should happen: CWA permit reform should be undertaken as part of a broader effort to streamline and speed up the regulatory permitting process writ large.

• “If we want to grow America’s economy, we need to fix this broken system,” Crain concluded.

The State of New York plans to construct the first major U.S. power plant in more than 15 years (The Wall Street Journal, subscription).

What’s going on: “Gov. Kathy Hochul said in an interview that she has directed the state’s public electric utility to add at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear-power generation to its aging fleet of reactors. A gigawatt is roughly enough to power about a million homes.”

• The New York Power Authority—created in 1931 by then-governor Franklin D. Roosevelt to manage hydropower for New York—will locate a site upstate and then determine a reactor design.
• Potential sites “include the grounds of New York’s three operating plants, all owned or majority-owned by Constellation Energy” and could consist of a single large reactor or several smaller reactors, according to Hochul.
• NYPA “may pursue the project alone or in partnership with private entities,” according to Hochul.

Why it’s important: The endeavor could spur a new age of reactor construction in the U.S. The industry has been stymied in recent decades in part by “permitting processes that move at a glacial pace.”

• Since 1991, just five new commercial reactors have come online in the U.S.—not nearly enough to offset the retirement of old plants.
• Nuclear generation capacity has declined more than 4% from its peak in 2012, as other electricity generation methods, such as solar, have experienced booms.

Closed—with no Plan B: In 2021, New York shuttered its Indian Point nuclear plant, about 40 miles outside Manhattan. The plant had supplied about a quarter of New York City’s electricity needs.

• “There was no Plan B,” Hochul told the Journal.

Nuclear resurgence: Since then, nuclear energy’s popularity has surged, due in part to the large amount of energy required to build artificial intelligence data centers.

• Late last year, Microsoft announced plans to restart the shuttered reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, and in March, the Energy Department approved $57 million in loans to get Michigan’s Palisades Nuclear Plant up and running again.

The NAM’s view: “New York’s plan to expand the role of nuclear in the state’s energy footprint is an important one,” said NAM Director of Energy and Resources Policy Michael Davin.

• “Nuclear energy is safe, emissions-free and available 24 hours a day. As such, it’s a critical component of America’s energy dominance strategy. It’s also vital for meeting additional energy needs that have arisen with the growth in data centers and the use of AI. President Trump recognizes this, and manufacturers commend him for the four executive orders he signed last month designed to boost the nuclear energy industry in the U.S.”