Kevin Brady

President Donald Trump is planning to kick off one of the most important sales pitches of his presidency this week—getting Americans fired up about rewriting the U.S. tax code.

A growing number of key congressional Republicans are considering a controversial maneuver that would allow for about $450 billion of tax cuts without offsets, according to four congressional aides familiar with the discussions.

A group of five Republican members on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee wrote a letter Thursday to Internal Revenue Service commissioner John Koskinen urging the IRS to stop rehiring former employees who had previous conduct or performance issues.

Top Republican tax writers went to a national shrine for tax cutters—former President Ronald Reagan’s California ranch—hoping to make a sales pitch for a historic overhaul of the U.S. tax code.

The reductions might not do all that much to help the economy in 2018.

Republicans struggling to pass a major tax overhaul that doesn’t add to the federal deficit are discussing a kind of compromise: mixing permanent revisions with temporary rate cuts for individuals and businesses.

Representative Ted Yoho had hoped to spend the August recess in his North Florida district making the case for a tax overhaul. Instead, the third-term Republican said he doesn’t know what to say when his constituents ask what the revamp will mean for them.

Republican congressional leaders doubled down on their pledge to overhaul the U.S. tax code by the end of the year after party leaders abandoned a proposal to tax companies’ domestic sales and imports.

A top income-tax rate of 44 percent for Americans earning more than $5 million per year isn’t under consideration, a White House official said Monday, knocking down a proposal said to be backed by top Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

Republican leaders in Congress and the Trump administration released a joint statement Thursday on their progress on tax reform ahead of Congress’s August recess and the broad principles they plan to follow.

Republican leaders conceded on Thursday that the border-adjusted tax doesn’t have the support to continue to be part of negotiations to overhaul the tax code.

Congressional leaders and Trump administration officials have been meeting in secret to try to reach a united front for rewriting the U.S. tax code.

The president may fall short of a single major legislative accomplishment in 2017.

House conservative leaders worry they’ll be forced to vote to advance a vehicle for a tax-code rewrite without knowing details of the plan, setting up a repeat of Congress’s troubled efforts on health-care legislation.

The unemployment rate inched up one-tenth of a point to 4.4 percent, as employers added 222,000 jobs in June, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, although accounting and bookkeeping services lost 300 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis.

Congressional Republicans’ dash to undo Obamacare is about fulfilling a seven-year promise to voters. But it’s also about seizing what may be the party’s last chance to wipe out the 2010 law’s tax hikes on upper income earners.

Four days before the one-year anniversary of the release of his tax blueprint, House Speaker Paul Ryan delivered a pep-talk seeking to assuage growing doubts about the prospects for a major tax overhaul.

The push to change congressional budget rules and enact tax cuts for longer than 10 years even if they add to the deficit received more support Thursday as the top Senate tax writer endorsed it.

Paul Ryan’s tenure as House speaker will be judged in part on whether he can deliver a Republican tax plan. But rather than spearhead the effort to reach consensus, Ryan is still clinging to his own widely rejected proposal.

House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady said he’s open to reviewing parts of the House Republican tax blueprint as Congress looks for a path forward on trying to make U.S. businesses more competitive globally—even as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin offered his most direct criticism of the plan yet.