Americans of all political stripes have learned over the years to dread three letters of the alphabet: I-R-S. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is a fearsome government agency with an incredibly disturbing history of abusing its power. Under President Obama, senior career officials in the agency were overtly targeting conservatives for their political beliefs, and under President Biden the agency engaged in leaking highly sensitive taxpayer information to help advance Biden’s tax increases. This is not the hallmark of an agency whose power you want to expand.
Whether you’re a small business owner, farmer, or a working-class American just trying to make ends meet, no law-abiding taxpayer is safe from the intrusive arm of the IRS. But Democrats in Washington have a different agenda. In everything they do, they are trying to empower Washington bureaucrats with command and control over the lives of everyday Americans. And last week, Biden signed into law perhaps the most aggressive expansion of Washington bureaucrats’ power in decades with the inclusion of $80 billion in their Inflation Act to supercharge the IRS.
That’s right – at a time when Americans are facing the double whammy of sky-high inflation and an economy in recession, Washington Democrats just doubled the size of the IRS. The agency will now be authorized to hire an additional 87,000 new agents – more than enough to fill Arrowhead Stadium – to target and harass even more low- and middle-income Americans.
The Biden administration wants you to believe their new proposal only targets the wealthy and large corporations.
They’re lying to you. How do we know? The proof is in their votes. When the bill was considered in the Senate, an amendment was offered to exempt Americans making less than $400,000 from any additional audits as a result of this legislation. Every single Senate Democrat voted no.
In fact, when the Congressional Budget Office – Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper – examined this proposal, they confirmed for me that at least $20 billion will come from increased audits on Americans making less than $400,000 per year. In Missouri alone, that means an additional 18,000 families making less than $200,000 will be victims of IRS audits. Projections based on historical IRS audit data show that under this expansion, the IRS will conduct an additional 700,000 audits on Americans making less than $75,000 a year. That’s unacceptable.
As the Republican Leader of the House Budget Committee, I’m fighting to expose this sleight of hand and to demand answers from the Biden administration about this massive increase in IRS funding. Not surprisingly, the administration is doing everything it can to block my attempts to conduct oversight activities.
