President Donald Trump, together with co-President Elon Musk and his DOGE minions, is reportedly planning to put off 1000’s of Inside Income Service brokers. And guess which of them? The tax collectors who work to ensure that the rich pay their fair proportion.
The Washington Put up studies that, at the least initially, Musk and Trump wish to lower round 9,000 new brokers. This could jibe with comparable studies that DOGE is concentrating on information hires with fewer authorized labor protections, together with lots of of staff on the Nationwide Most cancers Institute.
”My workplace is listening to that DOGE is now on the IRS. Which means Musk’s henchmen are ready to dig by a trove of information about each taxpayer in America. And in case your refund is delayed, they may very properly be the rationale,” Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon posted on X the day earlier than this announcement.
And never solely is the IRS being downsized, however there are additionally plans to show the division’s brokers into deportation police. Earlier this week, the Wall Avenue Journal reported that Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem requested the Treasury Division to deputize IRS investigators for this very function.
The GOP and its billionaire donor overlords have been attempting to decimate the IRS for years. Home Republicans like Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Chip Roy of Texas have tried to assault IRS staff with threats of Oversight Committee hearings and the stripping away of civil service protections.
Below the Biden administration’s Inflation Discount Act, the IRS acquired extra money than it had in years. That funding got here with a mandate to modernize techniques and to go after the uber-wealthy firms and people who often exploit loopholes, leveraging their assets to get out of paying even essentially the most meager charges.
Final yr, the company reported that it had efficiently collected greater than $1 billion from rich tax cheats. In January, because the GOP-led Congress threatened to chop its funding, the IRS introduced that it had introduced in an extra $360 million from rich tax dodgers.
In latest days, many have puzzled how Musk’s Tesla, which has boasted billions in revenue since 2020, paid 0% in taxes in 2024, 1.4% in 2023, and 0% in 2022—but is valued at greater than $1 trillion.
Musk famously moved his houses and Tesla operation from California to Texas, which allowed him to dodge an estimated $2.4 billion in taxes on income he generated for years in California.
