Accounting
Trump tax bill advances after deal for faster Medicaid cuts
A key House committee advanced President Donald Trump’s giant tax and spending package after Republican hardliners won agreement from party leaders to speed up cuts to Medicaid health coverage.
The vote in the House Budget Committee paves the way for passage of the
The late Sunday night committee vote followed a weekend of negotiations with four ultraconservatives on the panel who on Friday joined with Democrats to reject the legislation. Those hardliners instead abstained on Sunday and voted present, allowing the bill to advance.
Representative Chip Roy of Texas, one of the four hardliners, said party leaders agreed to move up Medicaid work requirements expected to kick millions of beneficiaries off the health coverage program and more quickly phase out clean energy tax breaks.
But Roy still expressed dissatisfaction, saying the measure “does not yet meet the moment.” Roy and the House Freedom Caucus said in posts on X they are hoping to win additional cuts before the bill comes up for a vote on the House floor.
Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington said he didn’t know what changes the party leaders had agreed to make. The changes will be added later, before the legislation is voted on by the full House.
House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters “there’s a lot more work to do” on the tax bill but said he would push on Medicaid work requirements “to make it happen sooner, as soon as possible.”
On Monday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told CNBC that work requirements would start in 2027, two years earlier than the timeframe in the draft legislation. But the Republican leadership staff later said that the date has not yet been settled.
Republicans broadly agree about imposing work requirements on Medicaid, the leadership aides told reporters. The discussion is around the start date, the people said. Republicans are also continuing to discuss the cap on the state and local tax deduction and when clean energy credits will phase out, they said.
There is strong support among Republicans for the tax cuts at the core of the package, providing an impetus to work out political differences.
But the House panel’s initial rejection of the legislation and the two-day impasse was an embarrassing setback for Republican leaders on their top legislative priority, highlighting ferocious infighting among party factions over components of the sprawling multi-trillion dollar fiscal package.
Trump fulminated against the ultraconservatives on social media Friday after they blocked the legislation, accusing them of “grandstanding” demands.
“It’s essential that every Republican in the House and the Senate unites behind President Trump and passes this popular and essential legislative package,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Monday morning.
She added that Trump plans to be “very engaged” as the bill moves through Congress and will likely call members directly if they are waffling on their support for the bill.
More turbulence may lay ahead as the legislation proceeds toward a vote by the full House and then consideration in the Senate, where the deeper Medicaid cuts the hardliners demanded as well as other provisions face scrutiny, if not outright opposition.
Republicans from high-tax states such as New York, New Jersey and California have threatened to defeat the legislation unless they get a higher limit on the federal income tax deduction for state and local taxes.
Deficit worries and long-term interest rates approaching 5% have enhanced a campaign by the party’s right flank to seek deeper cuts to government spending. Those concerns were highlighted on Friday evening when Moody’s lowered the U.S. credit rating to Aa1 from Aaa.
If the House does pass a version of their bill, more obstacles await in the Senate.
Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, has said he would not vote for the House measure’s cuts to Medicaid benefits and points to cutting prescription drug prices as a better way to gain savings.
The bill’s Medicaid cuts could also face skepticism from moderate Republicans, including Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — who helped defeat Trump’s effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017.
Still other senators, including Thom Tillis of North Carolina, whose state has billions in green energy projects already built or in the works, want a more gradual phase-out of Biden administration clean-energy tax incentives.
As initially unveiled by House Republicans, many clean energy credits would begin to phase out in 2029.
The tax breaks, which include incentives for wind and solar power, nuclear power and other sources of clean energy, have been ripe targets for lawmakers looking to offset the cost of extending Trump’s cuts.
Others, like the tax credit for electric vehicles, would in most cases phase out starting at the end of 2025.
Big Four firm PwC announced new agentic AI capacities, including a model that proactively identifies areas of value leakage and acts inside the tools teams already use to fix them itself.
The new solution,
The software, which is supported by PwC’s recently released
The system connects directly into ERP environments, continuously monitors key metrics, and acts inside the tools teams already use. For example, a supply chain agent might detect rising shipping costs and automatically reroute deliveries to reduce spend. Finance agents can spot and correct billing errors before they reach the customer. Clients typically see measurable efficiency gains in the first quarter, with continued improvements over time as the system learns and adapts.
“Too many transformations still rely on one-off pilots and stale data, stretching the gap from insight to impact and suffocating ROI,” said Saurabh Sarbaliya, PwC’s principal for enterprise strategy and value. “Agent Powered Performance flips the economics by distilling PwC’s industry transformation playbooks into AI agents that turn static insights into compounding gains, without rebooting each time.”
Agent Powered Performance is platform-agnostic and built on an open architecture so it can work across different LLMs based on client preferences and task-specific needs. It works with major enterprise platforms including Oracle, SAP, Workday and Guidewire.
Agent OS Model Context Protocol
PwC also
By integrating this standard, agent systems registered as MCP servers can be used by any authorized AI agent. This reduces redundant integration work and the overhead of writing custom logic for each new use case. By standardizing how agents invoke tools and handle responses, MCP also simplifies the interface between agents and enterprise systems, which will serve to reduce development time, lower testing complexity, and cut deployment risk. Finally, any interaction between an agent and an MCP server is authenticated, authorized and logged, and access policies are enforced at the protocol level, which means that compliance and control are native to the system—not layered on after the fact.
This means that agents are no longer siloed. Instead, they can operate as part of a coordinated, governed system that can grow as needs evolve, as MCP support provides the interface to external tools and systems. This enables organizations to move beyond isolated pilots toward integrated systems where agents don’t just reason, but act inside real business workflows. It marks a shift from experimentation to adoption, from isolated tools to scalable, governed intelligence.
Research Composer
Finally, a PwC spokesperson said the firm has also launched a new internal tool for its professionals called Research Composer, a patent-pending AI research agent embedded in the firm’s ChatPwC suite, designed to accelerate insight generation by combining web data with PwC-uploaded content.
Professionals will use the Research Composer to produce in-depth, citation-backed reports for either the firm or its clients. The solution is intended to enhance the quality of client work by equipping teams with research and strategic analysis capabilities.
The AI agent prompts users through a step-by-step research workflow, allowing them to shape how reports are packaged—tailoring the output to meet strategic needs. For example, a manager in advisory services might use Research Composer to evaluate white space opportunities across industries or geographies, drawing from internal reports and up-to-date market data.
Eide Bailly, a Top 25 Firm based in Fargo, North Dakota, is growing its presence in the Pacific Northwest by adding Traner Smith, based in Edmonds, Washington, effective June 2, 2025.
Traner Smith’s team includes two partners and 16 staff members and specializes in tax compliance and advisory services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eide Bailly ranked No. 19 on
Eide Bailly already has offices in Seattle, but hopes to grow further in the Pacific Northwest. “We’re pleased to welcome the talented team at Traner Smith to Eide Bailly,” said Eide Bailly managing partner and CEO Jeremy Hauk in a statement Monday. “Their expertise with high-net-worth individuals, real estate and privately held businesses aligns well with our strengths, and their client-centric approach is a perfect cultural fit. Having an office in Edmonds, Washington, is a great complement to our existing presence in Seattle. Together, we’re poised to deliver even greater value to families and businesses in the Seattle metro area.”
“Joining Eide Bailly is a natural next step for us — it provides access to deeper technical resources in areas like state and local tax, national tax, succession planning and international tax while allowing us to continue the personalized service our clients value,” said Kevin Smith, a partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
“With this expanded support and platform, we’re excited to grow our reach, elevate what we do best, and help more clients than ever before,” said Shane Summer, another partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
Eide Bailly has announced several other mergers in recent weeks. Earlier this month, it added
In 2023, Eide Bailly added
Top 100 firm
“We began working with Knuula in Spring 2024 to streamline our engagement letter process,” said Don Murphy, Managing Member of BMSS. “It quickly became clear that Knuula was not only a strong solution for us, but also an ideal partner in advancing industry-wide automation.”
While the specific terms of the deal were not disclosed, a spokesperson with Knuula said that, after this investment, BMSS and a collection of 21 of their partners now own 13% of the company. The investment represents not some passive revenue deal but an active collaboration between the two companies, with the spokesperson saying they will be working closely together on things like product development, new features, improvements, and networking.
The deal comes about a year after Knuula integrated with QuickFee, a receivables management platform for professional service providers, which allowed users to have engagement letters directly connecting to their QuickFee billing platform, tying the execution of the letter directly to the billing process.
“We’ve long sought to partner with a firm focused on strategic innovation in the accounting space,” said Jamie Peebles, founder of Knuula. “To develop a perfect solution for large firms, it is ideal to have a partner that is willing to work closely together and iterate quickly. This requires constant feedback between our two teams. The IT team from BMSS worked with our development team constantly and helped us iterate rapidly. We also had consistent input from partners, manager, and administrative staff to help us make valuable changes to Knuula. BMSS was a perfect partner for us.”
PwC AI agent acts proactively to preserve value
Eide Bailly merges in Traner Smith
BMSS announces investment, collaboration with Knuula
New 2023 K-1 instructions stir the CAMT pot for partnerships and corporations
The Essential Practice of Bank and Credit Card Statement Reconciliation
Are American progressives making themselves sad?
-
Accounting1 week agoEssential Strategies for Maintaining Data Security in Modern Bookkeeping
-
Finance1 week agoAmerica failing its young investors, warns financial guru Ric Edelman
-
Economics6 days agoCPI inflation April 2025: Rate hits 2.3%
-
Finance1 week agoPowell may have a hard time avoiding Trump’s ‘Too Late’ label even as Fed chief does the right thing
-
Economics1 week agoTariff receipts topped $16 billion in April, a record that helped cut the budget deficit
-
Economics1 week agoChecks and Balance newsletter: The election of Pope Leo XIV goes beyond American politics
-
Personal Finance5 days agoHouse Republicans advance Trump’s tax bill. ‘SALT’ deduction in limbo
-
Economics4 days agoViolent crime is falling rapidly across America