House Republicans kept their tax bill under wraps for as long as possible to hold back a deluge of lobbyists. After trade groups spent the weekend poring over the details, the flood is on.

The release of Republicans’ long-awaited tax bill has sent trade groups representing everything from architects to universities scrambling to secure changes to legislation they fear would harm their industries.


With the House Ways and Means Committee marking up the bill this week and Republicans determined to move it through the House by Thanksgiving, lobbyists are rushing to make their cases before it’s too late.

“We’re treating every day like it could be the decisive day,” said Bob Chlopak, a lobbyist representing Americans Against Double Taxation, a coalition fighting to preserve deductions for state and local taxes.

Since the bill’s details were unveiled on Thursday, lobbyists have dug into the text, as their corporate clients plugged the numbers into economic models to figure out how it will affect them. Trade associations in Washington have sent emails to their members across the country and held conferences calls to try to figure out the best way to convince the Ways and Means Committee to spare deductions and tax credits they view as essential to their industries.

Now, many of the groups are settling on strategies for spurring their members to act or identifying members of Congress they will pressure to amend the proposal. Lobbyists see this week as crucial to influencing the House — even as they try to anticipate the course of the tax bill in the Senate, which is set to unveil its own legislation this week.

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“You basically have this week” to sway the House, said Jerry Howard, the chief executive of the National Association of Home Builders.

“Realistically, the timeframe in the House is narrow, which is why we’re beginning in earnest on the Senate side,” Howard added.

House Republicans’ proposed tax changes range from the well-known to the relatively obscure. The National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Home Builders, for instance, have spent months pressing lawmakers not to reduce the home mortgage-interest deduction. The home builders endorsed an initial draft of House Republicans’ proposal last month, only to pull their support after House Speaker Paul Ryan nixed a tentative deal the home builders had struck Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady.

The House bill unveiled last week would limit the deduction on new home purchases to mortgages of $500,000, instead of $1 million under current law, and eliminate it for new purchases of second homes.

The details of the House bill came as the Realtors — one of the top lobbying spenders in Washington — gathered at a national conference in Chicago this weekend, giving the group a chance to galvanize members.

“They’re all prepared to go back to their states and their communities and make sure their members of Congress know where we stand,” said Jamie Gregory, a top lobbyist for the National Association of Realtors.

Realtors across the country have sent more than 114,000 emails to their members of Congress, Gregory said, and they’ll decide “within the next two days” where to deploy staff. The group is eyeing sending people to congressional districts with high rates of homeownership that also have high property taxes, making the suburbs of cities like New York, Philadelphia and Chicago likely targets.

The American Institute of Architects, meanwhile, is homing in on ways to save tax credits that have gotten much less attention.

The group sent out an email blast to its members on Thursday identifying three threats in the bill: a change to the tax rate paid by so-called “pass-through” entities that would reduce taxes for many businesses but not architecture firms, and cuts to tax credits for historic preservation and energy efficiency. The architects are appealing to two Republican members of the Ways and Means Committee — Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), who has supported the historic preservation credit in the past, and Dave Reichert (R-Wash.), who has backed the energy efficiency one — for help.

“We’ll be leaning on those folks to really bring the concerns up in the committee,” said Ian McTiernan, a lobbyist for the American Institute of Architects.

Other trade groups unhappy with the bill include the American Wind Energy Association and the American Association of Universities.

The Ways and Means Committee began marking up the bill on Monday but did not make speedy progress. Republicans unveiled an amendment on Monday evening that would narrow a proposal to begin taxing private universities’ endowments, which had infuriated colleges, and made several other changes.

Trade associations and coalitions also are running online ads and waging campaigns on social media, trying to rouse support to preserve favored tax breaks.

“Our advice to clients for the past several months was to make sure you had a contingency campaign plan in place and a message that can be boiled down to 140 characters,” said Ken Spain, a founding partner of CGCN’s strategic communications practice and a former House GOP staffer.

Brady has been preparing to tackle a tax overhaul for years, and he’s ready for the onslaught of lobbyists looking to preserve their clients’ favored provisions, said Lori Harju, a former senior adviser to Brady who’s now a lobbyist at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.

“Brady always said every industry must give something” in order to bring down the overall corporate tax rate, Harju said. “But you don’t want to crush an industry, either.”

Lobbyists looking to make their case this week should show up with an alternative proposal, Harju said. “Is there a way you think it can be fixed to make it less painful for you?” she said she counsels clients.

“Don’t underestimate Kevin Brady,” she added. “He is not going to let this die.”

Brian Faler contributed to this report.