We Energies, Kohl’s Paid Zero Federal Taxes in 2025

Oak Creek Power Plant. Photo taken November 13, 2021 by Dave Reid.

A new study finds that 88 corporations paid zero in federal taxes in 2025 while making large profits. “Collectively these 88 corporations reported over $105 billion in US income and $0 in federal income tax,” the study by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) found.

That included two Wisconsin companies: WEC Energy Group, the parent company of We Energies, had profits of $1.67 billion in 2025 yet paid not a dollar in federal income taxes, and Kohl’s had profits of $294 million yet paid zero in federal income taxes.

“While the biggest U.S. corporations have avoided taxes in this way for decades, it appears that corporate tax avoidance has increased in the most recent year. This is at least in part due to two separate packages of corporate tax cuts pushed through by the Trump administration: last year’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” the ITEP report noted.

“The statutory federal income tax rate for corporate profits is 21 percent, which means these 88 corporations would have paid a collective total of $22.1 billion for the year had they paid that rate on their 2025 income. Instead, they received $4.7 billion in tax rebates,” the report explained.

When measured against the 35% corporate income tax rate in effect before the two corporate tax cuts pushed through by Republicans and President Donald Trump since 2017, “these companies collectively cut their income taxes by $41 billion in 2025 alone.”

The biggest winner on the list of 88 corporations was automaker Tesla, which reported zero federal income tax paid on almost $5.7 billion of U.S. income in 2025. Even as it paid no taxes, the company awarded its CEO Elon Musk a 10-year pay package that would award him as much as $1 trillion.

Meanwhile, Musk has paid little in federal income taxes, as ProPublica has reported, paying just 3.27% of his total income of nearly $14 billion from 2014 through 2018 in federal taxes.

ITEP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan tax policy organization founded in 1980 that has done many reports on taxation. In 2024 it reported on how corporations saw their taxes plummet under the first Trump tax cuts. The country’s 296 largest, most consistently profitable corporations saw their effective tax rates fall from an average of 22% to 12.8% after the Trump tax law went into effect in 2018, saving the companies $240 billion in taxes, the report found. “There were, however, 50 companies that saw tax increases,” the report noted. “These tended to be companies that were starting with low effective tax rates.”

The report’s appendix listing all the companies included six based in Wisconsin, including five that saw tax cuts:

– Oshkosh Corporation: tax rate dropped from 35% to 9%, saving the company $523 million from 2018 through 2021;

– Rockwell Automation: tax rate dropped from 33% to 17%, saving $371 million over four years;

– Snap-on Inc.: tax rate dropped from 28% to 17%, saving $312 million over four years;

– A. O. Smith Corp.: tax rate dropped from 30% to 18%, saving $188 million in taxes over four years;

– Alliant Energy: tax rate dropped from 3% to 0%, saving the Madison-based utility $65 million over four years.

One Wisconsin company, ManpowerGroup, saw its federal taxes increase during this period, but its rate had already been low: it rose from 7% to 10%, increasing its federal taxes by $17 million over this four-year period.

The 2017 law cutting the corporate tax was called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with proponents arguing the tax breaks would enable companies to invest more, thereby increasing wages and job openings. But as a 2023 study by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth found, this is not what happened.

Its conclusion: “49 percent of the gains from the C-corporation cut went to the owners of firms, while 11 percent went to firm executives (the top five highest-paid workers at the firm). The other 40 percent went to high-income workers (or those above the 90th percentile within their firm). Precisely zero percent went to low-paid workers (or those below the 90th percentile). This means executives alone pocketed $13.2 billion annually—a pay bump of roughly $50,000 per executive—while median workers received nothing.”