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On June 2nd, Americans for Tax Reform and the Tholos Foundation launched a coalition letter with 18 organizations urging Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to take decisive action against discriminatory foreign Digital Services Taxes (DSTs) targeting American companies.
The coalition highlighted a landmark new study by economist Professor Sinclair Davidson documenting how foreign DSTs are precision instruments engineered — by explicit legislative design — to target almost exclusively on American firms. In Spain, 64 percent of DST-liable firms are American. In Turkey, 69 percent are American and none are Turkish. In the United Kingdom, five firms — all American — accounted for more than 90 percent of DST revenue in the first year.
These taxes are not legitimate revenue measures. They are unconstitutional expropriation dressed in the language of tax policy — instruments of economic nationalism designed to raid American innovation because American companies cannot vote in foreign elections. The time for patience has expired. The United States must act with full force to defend American enterprise from this brazen assault on our companies, our tax base, and our economic sovereignty.
The financial stakes are enormous and growing. American firms currently pay $2.96 billion annually in foreign digital services taxes — a figure projected to reach nearly $6 billion per year by 2030, and potentially $9.6 billion under broader adoption scenarios already underway across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The cumulative ten-year cost to American companies could hit $117 billion.
Foreign DSTs are, in effect, unauthorized taxes on American small businesses and American families. When the United Kingdom introduced its DST, Amazon increased marketplace fees by 2 percent, Google raised advertising charges by 2 percent, and Apple adjusted App Store commissions — each explicitly citing the tax. French economic modeling found that approximately 90 percent of the DST burden was shifted onto users rather than absorbed by targeted multinationals.
The coalition credited President Trump’s leadership for already producing historic results — Canada and India repealed their DSTs in 2025, and binding prohibitions have been locked into six new reciprocal trade agreements. However, France, the United Kingdom, Austria, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and others continue to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from American innovators every year, and the coalition is calling on the Administration to escalate action against all remaining jurisdictions maintaining DSTs.
Read the full letter here.
