President Trump’s U.S. energy dominance agenda could be derailed by one provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the tax and spending bill championed by the President and currently under review by the U.S. Senate.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains Section 899, officially named ‘Enforcement of remedies against unfair foreign taxes.’
This section proposes to increase the tax rates on foreign companies operating in the United States from countries that have what the Bill describes as “unfair foreign taxes.”
It is widely believed that “unfair foreign taxes” relate to the EU and UK tax regimes, which the Trump Administration considers as discriminatory in taxing U.S. firms, especially America’s technology giants.
If the Big Beautiful Bill passes as-is, increased tax rates would hurt Europe-based energy companies with large operations in the United States. These include the UK’s Shell and BP, France’s TotalEnergies, and Spain’s Repsol, Reuters columnist Ron Bousso notes.
Higher taxes on major foreign oil and gas operators in the U.S. would reduce company profits and potentially undermine further investment by them in expanding U.S. oil and gas supply.
This is the opposite of President Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ slogan from the campaign trail and the executive orders and legislation along the same lines passed in the first months in office of the new administration.
As a result of Section 899, Shell could lose up to $800 million of free cash flow per year from its Gulf of Mexico operations alone. The hit to BP could be as much as $300 million off its free cash flow a year, according to estimates by Reuters’ Bousso.
Section 899 of the Big Beautiful Bill would hurt overall investment in the U.S. from abroad and would cost America jobs, trade groups and fund managers warn.
The Investment Company Institute (ICI), representing fund managers in the U.S., said that Section 899 “is currently written in a manner that could limit foreign investment to the US—a key driver of growth in American capital markets that ultimately benefits American families saving for their futures.”
The Global Business Alliance, a trade group for international companies in the United States, warned that Section 899 could eliminate 700,000 U.S. jobs and reduce U.S. GDP by $100 billion annually, citing an independent third-party analysis by the EY Quantitative Economics and Statistics (QUEST) practice.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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