Tom Rooney, the president and chief executive officer of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association (NTRA), said Wednesday that the focus of his organization's current lobbying efforts in Congress is getting a recently enacted tax law reversed so horse race bettors can go back to deducting 100% of their gambling losses instead of the 90% that was imposed by passage of the sweeping One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) signed into law July 4.The NTRA has estimated that the financial hit to the racing industry because of this tax change could be a loss of over $1 billion in handle.Rooney, speaking during a Dec. 10 presentation at the Global Symposium on Racing hosted by the University of Arizona Race Track Industry Program in Tucson, expressed cautious optimism that what amounted to a new tax on horseplayers could be reversed before it goes into effect, even if the change isn't signed into law until early 2026.“We are told it will be retroactive,” Rooney said.But Rooney also drew upon his decade of experience as a United States Representative from Florida between 2009 and 2019 to underscore that even things that seem logical and beneficial to all parties in can be frustratingly difficult to implement in Congress.“Our biggest priority is that WAGER (Winnings and Gains Expense Restoration) Act,” Rooney said, referring to legislation filed by Kentucky Representative Andy Barr that would restore the deduction back to 100%.Rooney said that he believed the intent of the language in the OBBBA was for the federal government to reap about $1 billion in “easy money” by reducing the deduction that horseplayers could claim.“The problem with that is the people that bet on horses, the billion dollars that you think that you're saving, [those bettors] might just go elsewhere, and instead of getting the 90%, you're going to get nothing,” Rooney said.Rooney said that the NTRA has “implored the powers that be” to try and realize the unintended trickle-down consequences of the new law.As he discussed on a TDN Writers' Room podcast earlier this year, Rooney said taking $1 billion out of the handle equation impacts the “whole ecosystem of the racetrack, the people that work at the racetrack, the people that work on the backside, on the farms. Everybody is affected by this. And if you think that you're going to be making up a billion dollars from that tax, you're probably not. You're probably going to lose everything.”Rooney continued:“The good news is, the committees that are dealing with this, the Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, both don't oppose us changing this back to 100%.“It's just a matter of [coming up with] a vehicle that'll get the President's desk, probably in the beginning part of the year, where there's a bunch of fixes to the OBBBA, that will hopefully go through the Ways and Means Committee and the House and the Senate and get to the President's desk.“As you know, watching politics on TV, it sounds easy enough,” Rooney said. “We don't have any opposition. It's bipartisan. One of the reasons I'm no longer in Congress is that I got very frustrated at things like that, that seemed to be very easy to get done, for some reason just never got done.“So I'm patiently, hopefully, waiting for that to happen. But we're going to keep working it,” Rooney said. “We've already been working it through the Senate and through the House, walking the halls of Congress over the last several weeks to make sure those people understand what we mean.”The post NTRA: Cautious Optimism on Getting Gambling Loss Deduction Restored to 100%, Possibly Retroactively for ’25 Tax Year appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.