The Trump Administration and congressional Republican leaders are pushing back to early July the deadline for getting a budget reconciliation bill — with the extension of expiring Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) provisions, among other areas — to the President's desk for signature. After meeting with congressional leaders this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, "We hope that we can have this tax portion done by the Fourth of July." Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) described the Independence Day deadline as "aspirational."

The House Ways & Means Committee and Energy & Commerce Committee are now expected to hold their markups of reconciliation legislation the week of 12 May, rather than next week, as Republican leaders earlier had suggested. While the Ways & Means Committee is responsible for the centerpiece TCJA extensions, plus additional measures that are likely to include some of President Trump's tax proposals and some revenue offsets, the Energy & Commerce Committee is charged with coming up with $880b of the $2t in total deficit reduction. The Energy & Commerce $880b deficit-reduction figure is required as a condition for a full $4.5t deficit increase for tax cuts under the Ways & Means instruction.

The reconciliation legislative language written by 11 House committees — four with instructions that would increase the deficit, seven with instructions to reduce the deficit — will be assembled by the House Budget Committee. At that point, the legislation could progress to the full House for consideration. It is unclear if a House vote on the budget reconciliation bill could take place before the Memorial Day recess (which begins on 23 May for the House).

On trade, Treasury Secretary Bessent recently announced that the Trump Administration has a plan to address its Reciprocal Tariff Policy, saying the focus is on "17 important trading partners, and we have a process in place, over the next 90 days, to negotiate with them." He compared President Trump's trade negotiation tactics to "strategic uncertainty" in game theory and said high tariffs are "the stick" — and the carrot is a more favorable trade policy if other nations remove their tariffs, non-tariff trade barriers and currency manipulation, and stop subsidizing labor and capital.

This week also saw the 30 April deadline for the Office of Management and Budget assessment, required under the 20 January America First Trade Policy Executive Order (EO), of any distorting impact by foreign governments. That EO mandated an "economic and security review of the United States' industrial and manufacturing base to assess whether it is necessary to initiate investigations to adjust imports that threaten the national security of the United States."

The IRS has reissued its Memorandum for Treaty and Transfer Pricing Operations Employees, which lists the updated internal procedures for Advance Pricing Agreement (APA) prefiling meeting requests and the review and acceptance of APA submissions. The interim guidance allows the IRS to determine a taxpayer's suitability for an APA, or alternatively, another dispute resolution process. More specifically, the memo implements a rigorous screening process whereby the IRS Advance Pricing Mutual Agreement team (along with other Treaty and Transfer Pricing Operations personnel) may shift taxpayers from the APA process to alternative workstreams.

The IRS reissued the memo because the original one expired on 25 April 2025. The reissued memo has an expiration date of 22 October 2025, at which point it is anticipated that the guidance will be incorporated into the Internal Revenue Manual.

President Trump on 29 April nominated Donald Korb to be the next IRS Chief Counsel, one of only two IRS positions requiring Senate confirmation. Korb was previously Chief Counsel during the Bush Administration, beginning in 2004.