Despite the heightened interest during the presidential campaign, a spokesman for a private-equity group in Washington said he doesn’t expect any change.

“The overwhelming majority of Republicans in the Senate and the House, along with some Democratic members, support the current and appropriate tax treatment of carried interest,” said James Maloney, vice president of public affairs at the American Investment Council, which lobbies for the private equity industry. “We do not anticipate that to change.”

Fleischer has used Internal Revenue Service data on partnerships, the main organizational structure for private equity and other investment firms, to estimate that taxing carried interest at ordinary rates could raise $180 billion over a decade. That’s about 10 times the estimates made by the U.S. Treasury Department and Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation.

Bypass Congress

He has argued in papers and his column that President Barack Obama, who has called for ending the carried-interest break, could bypass Congress and do away with it through executive action. Asked if still held that view, Fleischer declined to comment. He added that his Senate role would be “separate from his academic work.”

Once an obscure academic, Fleischer rose to prominence shortly after he published a now-seminal paper in 2008 that criticized the preferential tax treatment of the profits. Written while he was an untenured professor at the University of Illinois School of Law, the paper, “Two and Twenty: Taxing Partnership Profits in Private Equity Funds,” is now the most-read work on the subject, according to the Social Science Research Network, the leading scholarly website for academic papers.

Fleischer said that a draft of his paper circulated on Capitol Hill around the time that Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman and chief executive officer of the Blackstone Group LP, made headlines with a multimillion-dollar birthday bash in February 2007. The event cast an international spotlight on the wealth generated by private-equity firms. Four months later, Blackstone conducted a $4.1 billion initial public offering that made Schwarzman’s stake in the company worth more than $7 billion and revealed his 2006 compensation: $398.3 million.

Newspaper Column

A native of Buffalo, New York, Fleischer, 44, may be the closest thing the tax world has to a rock star. He writes the weekly “Standard Deduction” column for The New York Times, in which he has called for universities to spend at least 8 percent of their endowments each year and for the IRS to crack down on real-estate investment trusts that operate prisons, casinos and data storage centers while getting preferential tax treatment available to real-estate income. “I won’t be continuing the column,” he said.

His new boss, Wyden, has slammed corporate inversions, in which U.S. companies move their tax addresses and taxable profits overseas. Wyden called last year for ending six corporate tax breaks that involve derivatives, deferred compensation and certain options trades. In June 2015, he introduced a bill to stop hedge fund reinsurers, including one tied to hedge fund billionaire John Paulson, from using offshore entities in Bermuda and elsewhere to avoid U.S. taxes. He wants to limit corporate deductions for interest payments and force U.S. companies to immediately pay taxes on their foreign earnings.