Editor's note: This essay was written in 2022 as a five-year retrospective on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. ¹ We are leaving the original analysis intact. Nearly all TCJA individual provisions were made permanent on July 4, 2025 by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, so most of the "sunset" anxiety captured here has resolved. The structural critique remains accurate.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (P.L. 115-97) was the most consequential federal tax legislation since 1986. From the vantage of late 2022, we can begin to evaluate which provisions worked, which created new complexity, and which created planning whiplash.
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