Image: Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon, speaks during an event on November 6, 2025 in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Alexander Tamargo/Getty Images for America Business Forum)

The tax law that congressional Republicans and US President Donald Trump enacted last summer has proved to be a massive boon for Amazon, slashing the corporate behemoth’s 2025 tax bill even as its profits surged and it moved ahead with mass layoffs that have cost 30,000 workers their jobs since October.

Citing a new securities filing, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Amazon’s “current US taxes, an accounting measure of taxes incurred last year, declined to $1.2 billion from $9 billion” while the company’s “pretax US profit increased by 44.5%, to $89.5 billion. On a cash basis, the company paid $2.8 billion in federal income taxes last year after paying more than $7 billion in each of the prior two years.”

The 87% decline in Amazon’s federal tax bill for 2025 was largely attributable to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s corporate-friendly depreciation tax breaks.

The new securities filing comes just days after Amazon confirmed it axed 16,000 corporate jobs as part of what’s believed to be a sweeping effort to replace workers with robots and artificial intelligence models in the coming years.

The Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, noted that the tax benefits that Amazon and other giant corporations are raking in “didn’t come free.”

“The same law slashed Medicaid and the [Affordable Care Act] and is now exacerbating our medical debt crisis,” the organization wrote on social media. “Congress made a choice: cut assistance for the most vulnerable to double down on a tax code already favoring dominant firms.”

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