As Senate Republicans debate President Donald Trump‘s “big beautiful bill”, a lesser-known provision from the House-approved package could make it harder to claim a low-income tax credit.

If enacted as written, the House measure in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” would require precertification of each qualifying child for filers claiming the so-called earned income tax credit, or EITC, starting in 2028.

Under current law, taxpayers claim the EITC on their tax return — including Schedule EIC for qualifying children.

The provision aims to “avoid duplicative and other erroneous claims,” according to the bill’s text. But policy experts say the new rules would burden eligible filers, who may forgo the EITC as a result. The measure could also delay tax refunds for those filers, particularly amid IRS cutbacks, experts say.

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“You’re going to flood the IRS with all these [EITC] documents,” said Janet Holtzblatt, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “It’s just not clear how they’re going to process all this information.”

Holtzblatt, who has pushed to simplify the EITC for decades, wrote a critique of the proposed precertification last week.

“This is not a new idea, but was previously considered, studied and rejected for very good reasons,” Greg Leiserson, a senior fellow at the Tax Law Center at New York University Law, wrote about the proposal in late May.

Studies during the George W. Bush administration found an EITC precertification process reduced EITC claims for eligible filers, Leiserson wrote. During the study, precertification also yielded a lower return on investment compared to existing EITC enforcement, such as audits, he wrote.

To qualify, you need “earned income,” or wages from work. The income phase-outs depend on your “qualifying children,” based on four IRS tests.

“Eligibility is complicated,” and residency requirements for qualifying children often cause errors, said Holtzblatt with the Tax Policy Center. 

For 2025, the tax break is worth up to $8,046 for eligible families. You can claim the maximum EITC with adjusted gross income up to $61,555 for single filers and $68,675 for married couples filing jointly. These phase-outs apply to families with three or more children.

As of December 2024, about 23 million workers received the EITC for tax year 2022, according to the IRS. But 1 in 5 eligible taxpayers don’t claim the tax break, the agency estimates.

Nine Democratic Senators last week voiced concerns about the House-approved EITC changes in a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.

If enacted, the updates would “further complicate the EITC’s existing challenges and make it more difficult to claim,” the lawmakers wrote.

Higher earners are more likely to face an audit, but EITC claimants have a 5.5 times higher audit rate than the rest of U.S. filers, partly due to improper payments, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The proposed EITC change, among other House provisions, still need Senate approval, and it’s unclear how the measure could change.

However, under the reconciliation process, Senate Republicans only need a simple majority to advance the bill. 

Republicans on Capitol Hill are weighing legislation that’s estimated to cut billions of dollars of funding for the Affordable Care Act and cause millions of people to lose their health insurance. Many of their constituents may not be happy about it, polling suggests.

Nearly half, 45%, of adults enrolled in a health plan offered through the ACA insurance marketplace identify as Republicans, according to a new survey by KFF, a nonpartisan group that conducts health policy research.

(More than three-quarters of those Republican ACA users identify as “MAGA” Republicans. Those MAGA Republicans represent 31% of ACA purchasers overall.)

Meanwhile, 35% of Democrats get their health insurance through the ACA, KFF found.

Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a multitrillion-dollar tax and spending package in May estimated to cut about $900 billion from health programs like Medicaid and the ACA, which is also known as Obamacare.

Senate Republicans are now considering the measure, which contains many of President Donald Trump’s domestic policy priorities. Republicans are trying to pass the megabill by the Fourth of July.

If the GOP enacts the legislation as written and doesn’t extend tax credits that lower monthly ACA health premiums, about 15 million people would lose health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“A large constituency of Republicans using the programs are potentially facing cuts,” said Audrey Kearney, a senior survey analyst for KFF’s public opinion and survey research program.

The survey was conducted May 5 to 26 among a nationally representative sample of 2,539 U.S. adults, including 247 who have purchased their own health coverage.

“Republicans are more likely to be entrepreneurs than Democrats,” according to a 2023 paper published by researchers at Columbia University, the University of California San Diego and the University of Alberta.

About 5.5% of Republicans become entrepreneurs, while that’s true of 3.7% of Democrats, they found.

However, 10 states haven’t adopted the expansion: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming. All voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

Republicans are “more likely to live in nonexpansion states,” John Graves, a professor of health policy and medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, wrote in an e-mail.

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Here’s why this matters for ACA enrollment: “In the non-expansion states, there’s a wider population eligible for the tax credits,” said Carolyn McClanahan, a physician and certified financial planner based in Jacksonville, Florida. She’s a member of the CNBC Financial Advisor Council.

In states that expanded Medicaid, nearly all adults with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty line (about $22,000 for a one-person household in 2025) are eligible for Medicaid.

In states that didn’t expand Medicaid, a broader population is eligible for subsidies to make ACA health plans less expensive, Graves said. The subsidized exchanges are available for people between 100% and 138% of the federal poverty line, among others.

“Given the heavy subsidies in that income range, and large amount of otherwise uninsured people, that would suggest more GOP-identifying people with low incomes would go the (subsidized) exchange route,” Graves wrote.

The Affordable Care Act has been vilified by Republicans since passage during President Barack Obama’s tenure. However, provisions within the law — such as creation of the ACA marketplaces, coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and the ability to stay on parents’ health plan until age 26 — have broad appeal, said KFF’s Kearney.

As of 2023, nearly 1 in 7 U.S. residents had enrolled in an ACA marketplace plan at some point since 2014, the year in which states rolled out marketplace plans, according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

“Our polling going back years has shown that when you ask about favorability of the ACA itself, Republicans view it as pretty unfavorable,” she said. “However, the actual provisions in it are very popular, and are popular among Republicans.”

The escalating battle between the Trump administration and Harvard University over international student visas could come at a high economic cost.

Altogether, international students who studied in the U.S. contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy in the 2023-24 academic year, according to the most recent data by NAFSA: Association of International Educators. In Massachusetts, alone, international students contributed nearly $4 billion and supported more than 35,000 jobs.

At Harvard, the share of international students is disproportionately high compared to most other colleges and universities. International students accounted for 27% of Harvard’s total enrollment in the 2024-25 academic year, up from 22.5% a decade earlier.

With more than 6,000 international students, Harvard supports over 1,125 local jobs and contributes $180 million to the greater Boston economy, largely through student spending, according to a new analysis by Implan, an economic software and analysis company.

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A ban on international enrollment could destabilize a vital revenue stream, said Bjorn Markeson, an economist at Implan.

“Because Harvard has a very high international student population, it’s going to have more of that impact,” Markeson said. “The economy is a network structure, so dollars flow through. They don’t just stay in one place — and when something hits Boston, it affects New England as a whole.”

Schools have increasingly sought out international students “because they compliment the student body, and that benefits all students,” said Robert Franek, The Princeton Review’s editor-in-chief.

But foreign students also typically pay full tuition, which makes international enrollment an important source of revenue for Harvard and many colleges and universities in the U.S., according to Franek. 

Tensions between the federal government and the Ivy League university have continued to escalate after Harvard in April refused to meet a set of demands issued by the Trump administration’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.

In May, President Donald Trump attempted to ban Harvard from enrolling international students, but a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order on Friday “to maintain the status quo.”

U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs said the restraining order would remain in effect until June 20. Meanwhile, Harvard President Alan Garber said that “contingency plans are being developed to ensure that international students and scholars can continue to pursue their work at Harvard this summer and through the coming academic year.”

In an interview with NBC News on Friday, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said Harvard needs to do more to combat antisemitism on campus and screen admissions of foreign students.

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