As is the custom, Congress and the Biden administration used the passage of the hilariously-named Inflation Reduction Act to tack on all kinds of additional pork totaling about $740 billion in newly printed dollars. That’s the bill that West Virginia’s credulous Senator Joe Manchin rolled over for, buying Chuck Schumer’s and Biden’s all-too-predictably bogus promises of future consideration to “support and expand fossil energy” to sign on. Manchin’s rube-like credulousness is still a source of amazement.
Anyway, along with the tax increases and drug price controls (with strangely little in the way of inflation-fighting provisions) the Inflation Reduction Act contained an $80 billion budget bump for our friends at the Internal Revenue Service.
Here’s a helpful way to think about the $80 billion: if the growth in IRS funding from 1977-2010 had continued (i.e., the budget cuts had never started), the $80 billion infusion plus strong, regular appropriations would put it back on this trend. pic.twitter.com/qilfQHeK8j
— Chuck Marr (@ChuckCBPP) December 14, 2022
Eighty billion is a lot of money even in terms of government spending. Hearing about all that extra cash in the hands of the revenuers didn’t give Americans a warm, fuzzy feeling. Videos like this one didn’t help matters much.
This is 100% real. Armed IRS agents training video. pic.twitter.com/uky7zVBcD8
— Anthony Brian Logan (ABL) 🇺🇸 (@ANTHONYBLOGAN) August 17, 2022
This week, however, IRS top dawg Danny Werfel sought to dispel rumors that the agency is planning to use a good chunk of all that additional cash to hire and train a horde of newly armed agents.
IRS faces online uproar over special agent job posting requiring use of deadly force https://t.co/Aplnzgmsdh pic.twitter.com/4g4Ea3lu0n
— New York Post (@nypost) August 11, 2022
As the AP reported . . .
Since President Joe Biden signed the measure, known as the “ the Inflation Reduction Act, ” in August, some Republicans have claimed the IRS would use the new money to hire an army of 87,000 tax agents with weapons.
That claim comes from a plan the Treasury Department proposed in 2021 to bring on that many IRS employees over the next decade if it got the money.
But don’t worry, Mr. and Mrs. America, Commissioner Werfel says they won’t be hiring a new division of gun-totin’ auditors. Instead, they’re going to spend a lot of those dollars on what the IRS has always been best known for…its customer service.
During the call with reporters, Treasury Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo said the plan “is heavily driven by the fact that we need to make technology investments that will improve productivity, which will mean that over time the number of employees and the mix of employees at the IRS will change.”
After Congress passed the legislation last summer, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen directed the IRS to develop a plan outlining how the tax agency would overhaul its technology, customer service and hiring processes. Her memo sent instructions to IRS leadership not to increase audit rates on people making less than $400,000 a year annually.
Whew…that’s a relief. No extra additional armed auditors. They’ll only be going after “the rich,” improving the agency’s technology, productivity, and customer service. Who could argue with that?
And only 7,239 of the first 20,000 they’re hiring — 36% — will be “enforcement staff.”
Getting iron-clad promises like that from people like Janet Yellen and Danny Werfel has to make you feel better, right?
Remember how they told you they were beefing up the IRS to go after the rich?
The truth is: The government often promises to go after the richest and most powerful as a pretense to enact policies that take from those who don’t have the resources to fight back. https://t.co/wV4dGquH9g
— Kat Timpf (@KatTimpf) February 11, 2023
