The Senate hopeful took advantage of the qualified business income deduction, a provision in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that Republicans extended in 2025
During a March 2025 stop on socialist senator Bernie Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, left-wing Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said President Donald Trump’s “deplorable and disgusting” tax cuts benefited “folks who don’t really need more money.” Months later, he claimed a $26,000 income deduction that was created as a part of that legislation, records show.
El-Sayed and his wife claimed a “qualified business income deduction” of $26,171 on their 2025 tax return, according to a partial copy of the return. Passed as a part of Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017 and then made permanent as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, the deduction allows owners of “pass-through businesses”—companies that do not directly pay federal corporate income tax and instead pass profits directly to their owners—to deduct 20 percent of their business income from their taxes.
El-Sayed reported plenty of pass-through business income. His latest Senate financial disclosure, which covers all of 2025 and the first seven months of 2026, lists $167,000 in income from AME Higher LLC, the firm through which El-Sayed accepts consulting and speaking fees. His wife, psychiatrist Sarah Jukaku, also owns a private practice, Mind Work Psychiatry, that is structured as an LLC. While it’s unclear exactly how much Jukaku earned from the practice—Senate candidates are not required to disclose their spouses’ exact income—El-Sayed’s tax return lists $292,881 in “additional income,” a category that includes pass-through business income.
El-Sayed saved about $6,000 in taxes by claiming the deduction. He also placed himself in a group of wealthy Americans working to “gut” the federal government, at least by his logic.
“I’m out here today in large part because we are watching as the government that our tax dollars paid for is being gutted by a set of billionaires who never actually had to use it,” El-Sayed said in an interview with self-proclaimed “lefty” broadcaster Laura Flanders ahead of the March 8, 2025, “Fighting Oligarchy” rally in Warren, Mich. “And they’re gutting it for pennies on the dollar to make sure that they can continue to pass a tax cut for folks who don’t really need more money. And so, you know, I find that deplorable and disgusting, and I think the 9,000 people who are here today feel the same way.”
El-Sayed’s decision to take advantage of a tax deduction he has assailed is the latest example of how the self-styled crusader for the working class has availed himself of tools and systems he has characterized as provinces of the wealthy. .
Though El-Sayed has called for universal health care through a single-payer “Medicare for All” system that would cover every American “from cradle to grave,” his wife does not accept Medicare, Medicaid, or any other insurance, instead requiring patients to pay out of pocket, the Washington Free Beacon reported. El-Sayed has attacked doctors who don’t accept Medicaid, arguing that they “discriminate” against “black communities.”
“Medicaid reimburses at nearly half the rate, which means that when you walk in with your Medicaid card, the doctor in the hospital thinks of you as a half citizen,” he said during an April candidate forum. “That means you can’t get appointments. That means they push you to the back. That means they discriminate against you, because they know that the care that your body requires is going to reimburse at half the rate.”
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. His appearance at the “Fighting Oligarchy” rally came one month before he launched his Senate campaign. It also came as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was being debated in Congress. One month after its enactment, in August 2025, Sanders railed against its tax provisions at another stop on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in Kalamazoo, Mich.
“As part of his love of the oligarchy, Donald Trump and his Republican friends gave us the so-called Big Beautiful Bill,” Sanders said. “In my view, that bill is the most dangerous piece of legislation passed in the modern history of the United States. … At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, that bill gave a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1 percent.”
El-Sayed is part of that 1 percent, at least in Michigan. His 2025 return shows $686,069 in total income, nearly $75,000 more than the $611,500 needed to be in the top 1 percent of statewide households, according to IRS data reported by Axios.
El-Sayed opened for Sanders at the “Fighting Oligarchy” stop in Kalamazoo. He also raised the One Big Beautiful Bill, calling it “that big ugly bill” and saying it would be “gutting Medicaid” to “pass a tax cut for billionaires.”
El-Sayed faced pressure to release his tax return from his primary opponent, Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens. He dismissed the attacks, saying that he would release the return and that it would be “pretty standard” and “pretty mundane.” He released the return’s first two pages on July 15, withholding any further detail. They show that more than $262,000 of El-Sayed’s income, or 40 percent, came from capital gains, while just $130,749, or 19 percent, came from wages. That’s not the case for the average American, who relied on earned income: In 2021, more than 60 percent of Americans’ personal income stemmed from wages, while nearly 18 percent came from capital gains, according to a 2024 Tax Foundation analysis.
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