Available evidence shows that discussion of replacing the U.S. income‑tax system with a consumption‑tax system (e.g., national sales tax, VAT‑style proposals) remained a recurring but niche theme in 2025, not a clearly more prominent or central topic than in the years immediately before.

Baseline (before 2025):

• In early 2023, the FairTax Act of 2023 (H.R. 25) to replace federal income, payroll, estate, and gift taxes with a national sales tax drew high‑level political fire: President Biden publicly attacked it as a national sales tax that would raise middle‑class costs, and Senate Democrats introduced a resolution condemning it, both widely covered in mainstream outlets. (congress.gov)
• Media and policy analysis in 2023–24 already framed FairTax and related national sales‑tax ideas as significant Republican proposals, with fact‑checking and think‑tank pieces explaining their mechanics and distributional effects. (fairtax.org)
• By 2024, Project 2025 was being heavily covered as a far‑right blueprint, explicitly highlighting its long‑term goal of replacing income and corporate taxes with a national consumption tax (national sales tax, VAT‑type options, flat consumption tax). Major outlets like the Guardian, Forbes, and advocacy groups dissected these consumption‑tax elements as a key part of the plan. (forbes.com)

This means that before 2025 there was already visible, national‑level political and media debate about moving from income to consumption taxation.

During 2025:

• The main enacted tax legislation in 2025—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025—extends and tweaks income‑tax provisions (extending 2017 individual rate cuts, altering SALT caps, creating deductions for overtime, tips, etc.) but does not implement or seriously advance a federal consumption tax. The structure of federal revenue remains income‑tax‑centric. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Project 2025’s consumption‑tax vision continues to be discussed in 2025 analysis pieces (e.g., Forbes Advisor; Center for American Progress), emphasizing that the blueprint envisions eventually moving from an income tax to a consumption tax and modeling how such a shift would affect middle‑class vs. wealthy households. But these are largely continuations of the 2024 debate over Project 2025, not a qualitative step‑change in salience. (forbes.com)
• Congress has ongoing background work and CRS material on consumption taxes and the reintroduced FairTax‑style bill, but these remain at the level of "one option for fundamental tax reform" and "an alternative model" under consideration, with no major new legislative push in 2025 comparable to, say, the 2023 FairTax Act media moment. (congress.gov)

Putting this together:

• The topic exists in 2025 and continues to be discussed, especially in the context of Project 2025 and academic/CRS analyses.
• However, the visibility and intensity of discussion were already high in 2023–24, with presidential speeches, Senate resolutions, and substantial media coverage centered on FairTax and national‑sales‑tax proposals. 2025 coverage largely extends those conversations rather than showing a clearly noticeable increase or making the shift to consumption taxation one of the dominant economic/political topics of the year (especially relative to tariffs, income‑tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, inflation, etc.).

Because the prediction specifically claimed we would "hear about it a lot more this year" and that the shift from income to consumption taxation would become a prominent topic in 2025 U.S. debate, and the evidence instead shows continued but not clearly elevated or central discussion, the prediction is best judged as wrong, not merely undecidable.