After many starts and stops over the last 30 years, Congress is poised to complete a comprehensive rewrite of the tax code. The House of Representatives passed its version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on Thursday, November 16. Later that same evening, the Senate Finance Committee completed the amendment process of the Senate version of the bill, advancing it to be considered by the full Senate.

The Senate is expected to bring the bill to the floor for a vote [this week] and thereafter the two chambers will have to come to an agreement before the final bill can be sent to the President. The process is now moving rapidly.

The Philanthropy Roundtable applauds Congress’s objectives of economic growth and tax simplification, and we are grateful that both the House and Senate versions of the legislation preserve the charitable deduction for those taxpayers who itemize. However, we are concerned that under both the House and the Senate bills, as a result of the doubling of the standard deduction, 95 percent of taxpayers will be unable to deduct their charitable contributions from their income. Over 30 million taxpayers will no longer have the charitable deduction available to them. This will cause charitable contributions to decline between $12 billion and $20 billion in 2018, according to the best available estimates.

Read the full article by Sean Parnell about tax reform from Alliance for Charitable Reform