Before COVID-19, President Donald Trump built a thriving economy that was a model for the rest of the world. A return to the prosperity of that economy is the baseline for this administration, not simply the goal.
The people gave the president a mandate in 2024: Enact an agenda that will spur affordable growth, level the global playing field, put more money in the pockets of hardworking taxpayers, and right-size our bloated bureaucracy.
The president has answered that mandate by pushing full steam ahead on the most ambitious economic agenda in a generation. He is realigning global trade with an America First agenda, incentivizing unprecedented investment in U.S. industry, and modernizing regulations to empower U.S. innovators and energy producers. Now, with an assist from Congress, he is cementing the most sweeping tax reform in decades.
Contrast the president’s success over the last 120 days with the situation he inherited. The government under former President Joe Biden had a reckless spending problem, having run up the largest deficit in our nation’s history while not at war or in a recession, and caused an affordability crisis.
The president, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and I are working to fix this. By rebalancing our trade arrangements, making pro-growth tax reform permanent, and reprivatizing the economy, the administration will realize the golden age the president has promised.
Step one of the Trump economic agenda is to level the playing field with our international trading partners. Consider the recently announced U.S.-U.K. trade agreement, which will create $5 billion in new exports for American producers.
The White House and Treasury Department continue to press China to engage in fruitful conversations so that we can achieve a “big, beautiful rebalancing” that could open up China’s consumer market to foreign trade.
Also consider the $2 trillion in financing that the president secured from our partners in the Middle East to extend America’s lead in artificial intelligence. Such an unprecedented injection of capital reflects the confidence investors, businesses, and sovereigns across the world have in America’s future, building a launchpad for the economy to take off through the second half of 2025. Through his bold actions on trade, the president is fighting to ensure Americans get a fair shake when doing business abroad.
Simultaneously, the administration’s actions are empowering individuals and small businesses here at home. To that end, the secretary is leading the negotiations to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which recently passed in the House of Representatives. By advancing this legislation, Congress will make permanent the 2017 tax cuts, which stimulated billions of dollars in domestic investment while driving costs down, took unemployment rates to 50-year lows, and raised wages across the income spectrum.
This bill will also rejuvenate U.S. manufacturing by restoring 100% expensing and expanding it to new factory construction, which will strengthen our domestic supply chains as we look to onshore many of the necessary and critical products that were strained during the pandemic, while spurring new investment that will keep our economy at the forefront of global innovation. Expensing for equipment and factories will support forgotten communities across the country and expand high-skilled and high-paying jobs that the president has championed throughout his time in office.
And it will empower the working and middle class by codifying no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security.
Congress must now finalize this legislation because failing to do so would inflict enormous harm on workers. It would cost our economy 6 million jobs, according to the National Association of Manufacturers, and it would send tax rates skyrocketing for average people.
The third step in the Trump economic plan is to remove onerous regulations that have impeded access to capital and cost our economy trillions of dollars.
The weight of unnecessary regulation not only suffocates business growth and investment but also harms individuals. That’s why the president has zeroed in on the costliest regulations of the Biden era. Recent executive actions to repeal Biden’s administrative overreach will save the average family of four approximately $2,100.
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The cumulative effect of the president’s economic agenda will be more jobs, better wages, and a higher quality of life for people across the country. Already, powerful evidence is emerging that the Trump economic plan is working. As a result, we have seen an additional 444,000 new private sector jobs in just the first few months of the second Trump presidency, inflation at four-year lows, and a 40-cent drop in gasoline prices over the past year.
Between the president’s bold actions on trade and deregulation, the administration is unleashing the full might of the U.S. economy. Getting the One Big Beautiful Bill Act across the finish line is fundamental to fully realizing this effort. Congress should continue to work with the White House to put this bill on the president’s desk in July. Working together, we will deliver on Trump’s promises and give the people the robust economy they voted for.
Michael Faulkender is the deputy treasury secretary.