Nearly a month has passed since President Donald Trump last spoke publicly of his desire to kill the carried interest loophole. (Yes, we know, some of you don’t consider it a “loophole.”) And yet the private equity industry, which stands to lose big if the president upends the tax break, is still bracing for a fight.

This is the biggest challenge to the provision since it was nearly neutered three years ago under former President Joe Biden.

The carried interest rule means that executives at hedge funds and private equity and venture capital firms pay roughly 20% tax on their profits, a rate that’s so low it’s drawn criticism from Warren Buffett and from progressive senators such as Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

One Washington lawyer described the lobbying effort to DealBook as “significant,” a sign of the escalating stakes.

Consider what’s happened in the past month: The American Investment Council, the private equity lobbying group, is reportedly circulating memos on Capitol Hill reminding lawmakers that private equity is a jobs creator. Venture capitalists, seemingly omnipresent in Trump’s Washington, grumble that they have to keep returning to Congress to “educate lawmakers” about the rule’s benefits. So-called free market groups, meanwhile, have banded together to ask Congress to maintain the status quo.

“They’ll fight tooth-and-nail on any sort of change,” said Jessica Millett, a tax partner at Hogan Lovells.

The carried interest lobby is made up of wealthy real estate, venture capital and private equity groups, including Blackstone and the Carlyle Group. The American Investment Council, the National Venture Capital Association, and the Real Estate Roundtable have long gone to great lengths to defend their favorite loophole.

“It’s really an evergreen point of contention for these trade groups,” Jonathan Choi, a law professor at USC, told DealBook.

What’s different this time: It’s hard to decipher how serious Trump is about killing it. Trump has long railed against carried interest, saying a decade ago that hedge fund managers exploiting the tax code were “getting away with murder.”

Eliminating carried interest would save the government an estimated $14 billion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Trump is on the hunt for far bigger savings if he is to pass his “big, beautiful” tax bill in coming months without blowing up the deficit.

Trump wanted to kill carried interest in his 2017 tax bill, only to give up amid opposition from lobbyists and Republican lawmakers, said Victor Fleischer, a law professor at UC Irvine.

And now?

“People think that it’s cheap talk,” Fleischer said.

But there are some in Democratic circles who believe that Trump may be more serious now than he was in 2017, DealBook hears — not least because those are the signals that they’re getting from the White House.

Trump’s disdain for carried interest is a rare fracture between him and Republican lawmakers. Traditionally, Democrats have been behind efforts to kill it and when Trump renewed his call to eliminate carried interest, congressional Democrats — not Republicans — were ready with stand-alone bills last month to do just that.

But Trump may be eroding GOP unity. Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, both members of the Senate Finance Committee, said in recent weeks that they were open to considering changes to the rule.

The last threat to carried interest came in 2022 when former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act included a provision to kill it. But before the vote, lobbyists bombarded the office of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the former Democrat (and then independent) of Arizona, with calls urging her to vote against it. Sinema ultimately voted for the bill, but only after carried interest was spared.

Lobbyists worry about GOP defections, but see holding Republicans as easier than the last go around when they had to flip an on-the-fence senator at the last minute.

“They don’t need a Sinema to save them,” Fleischer said.

Short of killing the rule, Congress could reform it as a way to pacify Trump. Hogan Lovells’ Millett said there’s significant industry concern that Congress will gut much of the rule’s usefulness by including measures like extending the qualifying holding period from three years to five years before the carried interest tax break kicks in. Such an extension could scramble the way these firms do business. Private equity firms, for one, are often able to hold onto investments for five to eight years, Millett said.

Fleischer, the law professor, kick-started the debate on carried interest two decades ago when he detailed how the provision works in a widely read academic paper. Reform or no reform, he believes the loophole is here to stay.

It “will outlive us all,” he said.