The Bill Is Signed. Now Who’s Laughing?

Trump inked the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025 with fireworks, fighter jets, the whole MAGA Broadway show. Buried under the pageantry are hundreds of pages that redraw the profit map for software companies, AI model-makers, and the folks who spin cotton into that tee you slept in last night.

I dove into the final text on Congress.gov, plus the Senate tweaks and industry primers, so you don’t have to sift through legislative mulch.

In Washington, beautiful means big enough to hide the bodies.

—my barber, this morning

R&D Expensing Reloaded

The headline for software shops is simple: Section 174 amortization is toast. Full, immediate write-offs for R&D are back and retroactive to 2022—see the House Ways & Means section-by-section cheat sheet and the KBKG breakdown. Small dev studios can even file for quick refunds on the two painful tax years they just crawled through.

Winners:
- Seed-stage AI startups that burn cash on GPUs and graduate interns instead of turning a profit.
- Big Tech, because “permanent” expensing + their lobbyists = infinite money printer.
Losers:
- CFOs who built five-year amortization waterfalls in Excel. Enjoy hitting delete.
- Anyone still shipping boxed software: Grandpa, Grandpa’s ERP, and niche on-prem vendors; the bill doesn’t revive the old domestic production deduction they loved.

Turns out the real killer feature wasn’t your product. It was bonus depreciation.

AI Moratorium Goes Kerplunk

Remember the House-passed ten-year freeze on new state AI laws? The Senate nuked it 99-1 (Goodwin recap). Good riddance or missed opportunity, depending on your compliance budget.

Winners:
- State AGs itching to score headlines by regulating chatbots like pit bulls.
- Boutique privacy law firms. Hello, billable hours!
Losers:
- Platform giants praying for a single federal rulebook. Now they get 50.
- Open-source model shops who can’t afford “one-size-fits-none” patchwork audits.

Washington just traded a decade-long cease-fire for 50 unsynchronized state bar fights.

Threads, Cotton & Cash

In the final bill text: Economic Adjustment Assistance for Textile Mills jumps from 3¢ to 5¢ per pound of upland cotton starting August 1. Couple that with the Pima Cotton Trust Fund and the Wool Apparel Manufacturers Trust Fund both extended through 2031. The farm lobby got paid.

Winners:
- Domestic spinners in the Carolinas and Georgia—they just got a federally funded coupon on raw fiber.
- Niche U.S. cut-and-sew shops chasing “Made in USA” margins.
Losers:
- Import-heavy brands banking on low-duty Asia supply chains; no new tariff relief, and the trust-fund cash flows only to U.S. soil.
- Sustainability die-hards clinging to recycled synthetics; cotton’s subsidy gap just widened.

Scorecard:

Cotton growers – 9/10 (free money, zero new strings)
Fast-fashion importers – 3/10 (squeezed by higher U.S. input costs)
Labor advocates – 5/10 (funds exist, but wage language is MIA)

Who Eats the Cost?

Phasing out wind-and-solar credits up to five years early (thanks, Senate energy riders) could change data-center power prices. This could be very good or very bad news for model training budgets. The dust will need to settle on that one. Meanwhile the bill gifts $100 B to border security and $25 B to missile defense. Translation: deficits increase, Treasury yields pop, and suddenly your Series B looks pricier. Macro whiplash isn’t in the press releases, but your runway might feel it.

GDP Growth bet the scorekeepers missed

CBO’s static score paints a $2.4 trillion fiscal crater and walks away whistling... Because by law it pretends the economy stands still (Mondaq).
Reality is messier:

Dynamic GDP pop. Tax Foundation’s microsimulation says the bill nudges long-run GDP up 0.8%, trimming the revenue hole by roughly 22% once extra growth is taxed (Tax Foundation).
White House sugar-high. The Council of Economic Advisers is pounding the table for a 4.6 – 4.9% level bump by 2028—rosier than a TikTok skin filter, sure, but still outside CBO’s spreadsheet (Tax Foundation).

Static scoring is like judging a marathon by photographing the starting line.

Tariff tailwind. Killing the $800 de minimis loophole could funnel $40 billion in fresh customs cash, none of which is in the official baseline yet (The Wall Street Journal).
Bigger hammer, bigger haul. Yale’s Budget Lab tallies the full 2025 tariff package at $1.5 trillion in conventional revenue over ten years—even after accounting for retaliation (Yale Budget Lab).

So the deficit monster is real, but the growth and tariff upside that Capitol Hill’s banking on could claw back a non-trivial chunk. Will it cover every red cent? Hell no. But if even half the rosy projections stick, the fiscal gap shrinks faster than a Shein tee in a hot dryer.

TLDR

The One Big Beautiful Bill is less a moon-shot strategy than a choose-your-own-adventure hand-out. If you write code or weave cloth on U.S. soil, pop champagne. If your moat is cheap imports or regulatory certainty, grab Advil.

In 2025, the government reminded us that policy is just another API. Learn it or get rate-limited.