The New York Times acted like getting former IRS commissioners to bellyache over President Donald Trump’s cuts to one of the most hated agencies in Washington was some kind of a flex.
Commissioners from both Democratic and Republican administrations penned a February 24 guest essay lambasting Trump for daring to initiate cuts to the IRS workforce: “Trump Just Fired 6,700 I.R.S. Workers in the Middle of Tax Season. That’s a Huge Mistake.”
Former IRS chiefs Lawrence Gibbs, Fred T. Goldberg Jr., Charles Rossotti, Mark Everson, John Koskinen, Charles Rettig and Daniel Werfel were up in arms over Trump allegedly not comporting with normal CEO strategy to strip waste from the organization by “Tak[ing] an ax to accounts receivable, the part of an organization responsible for collecting revenue.”
Here’s the issue: Not every "organization" has a notorious record of abusing taxpayers based on their political views while still getting billions in tax funding anyway as the IRS does.
It’s also hard to take this kvetching seriously since four of the authors, including Ronald Reagan appointee Gibbs, are on the record simping for President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar spending monstrosity erroneously named Build Back Better in a March 2021 op-ed headlined, “Biden’s proposal would create a fairer tax system.”
The authors, in an explicit display of irony, fawned over how “President Biden’s proposal would restore our tax administration system to make it far fairer and more effective. This would benefit everyone who pays their taxes.” Build Back Better was so extreme that even then-West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin (D) pulled his support. Biden eventually signed a scaled back version — dubiously dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act — into law in August 2022 even as the country faced a sky-high 8.5 percent year-over-year inflation crisis. Even Texas Tech University economist Benjamin Powell rebuked the scaled-back version by calling it “worse in our current [inflation-rattled] economic environment.”
Adding insult to injury is the fact that Werfel in particular sent an all-staff email in February 2024 noting that teleworking IRS employees would only have to work in-office fifty percent of the time on any given month. Tax Notes reported that as of February, “9 percent of all IRS employees were fully remote as of February” and “about 49 percent were frequent teleworkers.” In 2022, Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist estimated at the time that “53 percent of all IRS employees” were “working from home full time. Others spend ‘some’ time in the office.” Oh but God forbid Trump should make cuts, right?
In this context, Gibbs and company’s current attempts to make the IRS out to be an innocent victim of the Trump-Musk-DOGE purge even more laughable:
Every year, the government receives much less in taxes than it is owed. Closing that gap, which stands at roughly $700 billion annually, would almost certainly require maintaining the I.R.S.’s collection capacity. Depleting it is tantamount to a chief executive saying something like: ‘We sold a lot of goods and services this year, but let’s limit our ability to collect what we’re owed.’
Uh, excuse us? What “goods and services” does the IRS sell that would make its entitled bureaucratic apparatchiks think they’re “owed” anything? But the authors would go on to bemoan how aggressive cuts would allegedly “shift the burden of funding the government from people who shirk their taxes to the honest people who pay them, and it will impede efforts by the I.R.S. to modernize customer service and simplify the tax filing process for everyone.”
To insinuate that the IRS writ large does a bang-up job protecting the “honest people” who pay taxes at all is a bad joke. A 2020 Taxpayer Advocate Service report found that between January 3 and September 30, 2018, the IRS fraud detection systems “delayed the processing of almost $20 billion in legitimate refunds.” Around the same time, “the False Positive Rate (FPR) for non-IDT refund fraud filters was 81 percent, while the FPR for IDT refund fraud filters was 63 Percent.” And this only scratches the surface of why people generally despise the IRS as an entity writ large.
An April 2024 National Taxpayers Union Foundation analysis discovered that “[t]he opportunity cost of the time spent laboring over taxes comes out to $280 billion, while filers also incur out-of-pocket expenses on preparation costs amounting to at least $133 billion.” What’s worse is that “total is likely higher but the IRS has not complied with statutory requirements to assess this cost across its full inventory of tax forms.” As the NTUF concluded, “The IRS is expected to collect nearly $5 trillion in taxes, but above and beyond that amount, complying with the tax system imposes a $414 billion burden on Americans.”
Much of these fears perpetrated by the IRS propagandists are predictably overblown, especially coming from a collective of stuffed shirts who argued Biden’s spending nightmare was supposedly a good plan.
Tax attorney Adam Brewer told NewsNation that electronic tax filers in particular would possibly not see their returns affected by the Trump layoffs. To put that into perspective, 213.3 million returns and other forms were filed electronically in FY 2023, representing 78.6 percent of all filings according to IRS data. In addition, “For individual tax returns, 90.7 percent were filed electronically.”
If the newspaper is having a nervous breakdown over the IRS cuts, it should have no problem voluntarily donating a massive chunk of its $2.5 billion 2024 revenue to the U.S. Treasury in a genuine display of genuflection to the IRS.
The Times still thinks that the right way to defeat Trump is to collect a gaggle of supposed non-ideological Experts to oppose him. It's a tiresome tactic and it hasn't worked.
