Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said tech giant Meta would be a big winner if Congress passes President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
The U.S. House approved the Trump-backed tax and spending plan May 22. The Senate is expected to vote soon on the bill, which Trump says he wants on his desk by July 4.
“If every one of the 340 million people in America paid a new $35 copay to visit the doctor, that still wouldn’t be enough to cover how much Meta would get from just one tax break in Donald Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’” Warren wrote in a June 24 X post. The post included a video clip of Warren’s exchange with Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a liberal think tank, during a June 17 forum hosted by Warren and several Democratic senators.
Warren’s X post didn’t reference Medicaid, but during the forum, Warren compared two provisions she said are part of the bill: new copays for some Medicaid services and a tax break that would benefit Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, owned by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg.
Warren’s X post is accurate that $35 copays for every American — which equals about $11.9 billion — would be less than one estimate of what Meta would save from the proposed tax break. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that a tax break similar to what the Senate proposed would save Meta $15.1 billion over three years.
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Warren’s post doesn’t acknowledge that about 20% of Americans use Medicaid, so 80% of Americans would not face any direct impact from the Medicaid copay provision. However, during the forum, Hanauer said she expected the proposed $35 Medicaid copay would result in 400 million new copays, totaling $14 billion in new costs to Medicaid recipients.
Tax experts said Warren’s comparison of the Medicaid copay and the tax break is misleading.
Warren’s comparison of Medicaid copays and corporate tax break
Warren compared two provisions in the legislation.
The first is a Medicaid provision included in the House-passed bill and, to date, included in the Senate version. It would require states to charge copays up to $35 per service for some adult Medicaid recipients.
The proposed tax policy Warren referred to would let companies with research and development expenses retroactively deduct those expenditures all at once from their taxes, rather than spreading out the deductions over several years, as has been required since 2022. One provision of the Senate bill that Meta could benefit from is to deduct R&D expenses that hadn’t already been deducted from 2022 to 2024 in either the next one or two years, if the bill passes.
The idea of reviving the concept — called immediate expensing — has been floated on Capitol Hill for several years, backed by companies who say it will boost innovation and economic growth.
In a February 2025 reportthe Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy warned about the high price tag for this provision, focusing on its billions of dollars in tax benefits for Meta and four other large tech companies: Alphabet (parent of Google), Amazon, Apple and Tesla.
In its report, ITEP looked at what would happen if the pre-2022 law was put back into place, which is slightly different from what the Senate bill proposes. During the tax break’s lapse from 2022 to 2024, Meta owed $20.6 billion in taxes. If the R&D expensing provision were revived and made retroactive, ITEP calculated that the company instead would have owed a total of $5.5 billion in taxes for those years.
That means that if Meta deducts its 2022 to 2024 R&D expenses, the company could recoup around $15.1 billion in taxes, more than either Hanauer’s or Warren’s calculation of the Medicaid copay cost.
What does the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ include and not include?
The Senate bill does not include an exact revival of the prior research and development expensing law.
The House-passed version would revive full expensing for research and development from 2024 to 2029, but not on a retroactive basis back to 2022. The Senate version would allow research and development expensing starting in 2024 and make it permanent, rather than sunsetting it in 2029, as the House version would.
ITEP did not publish calculations of how companies such as Meta would benefit from the Senate version as opposed to a full reversion to the lapsed law.
However, in an interview with PolitiFact, Hanauer estimated that Meta would likely save roughly as much in taxes under the Senate version. Garrett Watson, director of policy analysis at the center-right Tax Foundation, said he can’t speak directly to the Meta tax impact, but said he doesn’t think there’s a large difference in the overall policy impacts between the Senate version and the previous law.
Tax experts say Warren’s comparison is not apples-to-apples
Warren sought to explain how big Meta’s tax windfall could be. But tax experts say her comparison is imperfect.
An increase in copays involves an immediate cost to patients. But changing the rules of tax expensing would affect how fast a company can benefit from a tax break, not whether they receive the tax break. The companies still would receive the tax breaks even if the law remains unchanged, but over a longer period of time.
Immediate expensing means that, for tax purposes, a company expenditure can be deducted from its revenues immediately. The alternative would be amortization, which means the deduction from revenues would occur fractionally over several years.
Companies benefit from being able to expense rather than amortize, because they get to keep more of their money sooner. But the company will still get the benefit of the deduction under amortization rules; it will just get the benefit more slowly.
This complicates a mathematical comparison of the tax break with something as clear-cut as copays, Watson said.
“R&D expensing changes the timing of R&D expense deductions, so it’s different from, say, a decrease in tax rates that mechanically reduces tax liability now and moving forward,” Watson said.
Our ruling
Warren said, “If every one of the 340 million people in America paid a new $35 copay to visit the doctor, that still wouldn’t be enough to cover how much Meta would get from just one tax break in Donald Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill.’”
The House-passed version of the bill doesn’t include this provision. The Senate version includes a tax break similar to one the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates would save Meta $15.1 billion over three years. Warren compared it with a cumulative $11.9 billion price tag for millions of medical copays.
Experts say that Medicaid copays are an immediate cost to patients. The research and development tax break involves when a company benefits from a tax break, not if they benefit.
The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details. We rate it Half True.
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