ABC President and CEO Mike Bellaman joined President Donald Trump and other business leaders at the White House Tuesday to discuss their support for tax reform legislation. At the meeting, President Trump outlined the necessity for tax reform, and thanked the organizations present for supporting the unified tax framework. 

ABC President and CEO Mike Bellaman hit the airwaves last week one day after congressional and administration leaders released a highly anticipated tax reform framework. “Our 21,000 members are applauding,” ABC CEO Mike Bellaman said in a live interview with Fox Business’s early-morning FBN:am show on Thursday, Sept. 28. “This helps our big companies, our small companies as well as our workers.”

President Trump kicked off his push for tax reform with a speech at a manufacturing facility in Springfield, Mo., making the case that a "pro-growth, pro-jobs, pro-worker, and a pro-American" tax code is the key to revitalizing Main Street businesses, bringing back jobs and keeping the United States competitive in the global economy. The event, attended by local small business leaders including more than a dozen members of ABC’s Heart of America Chapter, marked the opening salvo in the White House’s effort to sell a highly anticipated tax bill that sits atop the GOP’s fall legislative agenda.

In the waning days of the Obama administration, the Treasury Department released proposed regulations under Section 2704 that could have a profound impact on the valuation and therefore taxation of family businesses. The regulations as written would institute back-door “family attribution,” a standard that has been rejected by the courts for decades, and that would jeopardize traditional discounts for minority ownership stakes, inflating tax bases by as much as 40 percent.  As the regulations were not finalized by the time President Obama left office, there is no effective date, but the rule remains pending.

The White House rolled out its tax proposal, which aides have billed as “the biggest individual and business tax cut in American history” on April 26. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and National Economic Council Chair Gary Cohn laid out President Trump’s principles for reform from behind the podium, and a one-page document was distributed to the press.

On March 24, the U.S. Department of State signed a permit approving the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline, which would ship crude from Canada's western oil-sands region to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The memorandum invited TransCanada to re-submit its application for a presidential permit for the construction of the 1,600-mile pipeline and requested that the State Department reach

ABC’s unique quarterly Construction Backlog Indicator (CBI) gives ABC members and the broader construction community a look at the future economic health of the construction industry by measuring the amount of work companies are contracted to complete in the months and years ahead. CBI is a forward-looking indicator compiled from surveys completed monthly by ABC members indicating the amount of work under contract but yet to be completed in the months and years ahead. All reported data is confidential, if you’re not participating, sign up today.

Nonresidential construction spending grew 0.4 percent on a monthly basis in Dec. 2014, according to the Feb. 2 release from the U.S. Census Bureau. Spending for the month totaled $627.1 billion on a seasonally adjusted, annualized basis, 5.9 percent higher than Dec. 2013. The government also upwardly revised November’s spending estimate from $617 billion to $624.8 billion and October’s figure from $623 billion to $627.4 billion. “Despite the slight expansion indicated in today’s report, nonresidential construction lost some of its momentum during the final two months of 2014; however, this should represent only a minor dip in the indu

In his 2015 economic forecast released Dec. 9, ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu relayed his forecast for a steady recovery among the U.S. commercial and industrial construction industries in 2015, continuing the momentum built in 2014.

ABC’s Construction Backlog Indicator (CBI) reached an all-time high in the second quarter of 2014, according to a report issued Aug. 19. After falling 2.8 percent in the first quarter, second quarter CBI improved 5.4 percent to reach 8.5 months. In addition, there were gains in every industry segment, in nearly all geographic regions and for firms of almost all sizes. ABC’s chief economist expects that trend to continue.