Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025. Today it turns exactly one year old, and CBS News beat everyone to the "winners and losers" framing yesterday — which tells you this anniversary was circled on every finance desk's calendar except the one that actually has to pay for it: yours, if you or your family sends money to Mexico.
What the numbers show
The Congressional Budget Office's final score put the bill at roughly $3.4 trillion added to the national debt over ten years — more than $4 trillion once you add the interest on that extra borrowing. That's not a partisan estimate; it's CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation doing the arithmetic Congress asked them to do. On the corporate side, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Tesla together booked an estimated $51 billion in tax breaks in 2025 alone, much of it from the law's restored 100% bonus depreciation and R&D expensing. Meanwhile SNAP enrollment has dropped by more than 4 million people — over 10% — since the new work requirements rolled out, and the EV tax credit's expiration on September 30, 2025 helped drag new electric vehicle sales down 27% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, per Cox Automotive's official Q1 report. Buried in that same 900-page bill is Section 4475, the provision that actually reaches into freelancer and migrant-worker wallets: a 1% federal excise tax on remittances sent in cash, money orders or cashier's checks, in effect since January 1, 2026.
The official bill text as passed, hosted on Congress.gov. Section 4475 — the remittance excise tax discussed below — is in there if you want to read the actual statutory language.
Read the full text on Congress.gov →Why this matters for freelancers
Here's the part that gets lost in the "1%" headline: the tax only applies if you fund the transfer with physical cash, a money order or a cashier's check. Pay from a bank account, debit card or credit card and it doesn't touch you at all — and Banxico says 99% of remittances to Mexico already move electronically. So if you're a freelancer billing clients abroad and wiring money home through your bank, this tax mostly isn't your problem. It's a problem for the minority who still line up at a physical counter with cash — often the least banked, most vulnerable senders, which is exactly why remittance researchers at groups like AidData and the Financial Technology Association have called it regressive by design. If you do send money to family in Mexico with cash, switching to an electronic transfer is the single easiest way to avoid the charge entirely.
Context: how we got here
The tax started life much uglier — House Republicans first floated a 5% levy, then cut it to 3.5%, before the Senate reconciliation process whittled it down to 1% and narrowed it to cash-funded transfers only. Sheinbaum framed the reduction from 5% to 1% as a win for the migrant community that had lobbied senators against it — generous framing for a tax that didn't exist a year earlier. Mexico's remittances had already turned negative before the tax even took effect: 2025 closed with a 4.6% annual drop to $61.8 billion, the first yearly decline in eleven years, driven mainly by a weaker U.S. labor market and migrants avoiding work over deportation fears. January 2026, the tax's first month on the books, brought roughly a 1% year-over-year dip. But the picture isn't a straight collapse — Banxico's own numbers show cumulative flows turned positive again by spring, up 2.8% year-over-year for the January–May 2026 period, with May alone up 3.8%, which suggests the tax itself is a smaller drag than the immigration climate that preceded it.
What comes next
Mexico's actual countermeasure ended up being simpler than the reimbursement scheme Sheinbaum first promised. Instead of refunding the 1% after the fact, the government leaned on FINABIEN's "Paisano" card, which routes remittances electronically for a flat $2.99 fee and sidesteps the tax altogether since it isn't a cash transfer. What started as a modest rollout in the U.S. when the program launched in July 2025 had, by March 2026, comfortably blown past its original 100,000-card target — Finabien's own director put active cards in the low hundreds of thousands that month, with separate government figures citing more than 1 million cards issued overall, depending on how "active" is defined — with heaviest adoption in cities like Los Angeles. That's a faster rollout than most government fintech pilots manage, and it's arguably done more to blunt the tax than the aborted refund plan ever would have.
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