The Biden White House is suddenly less willing to aid Israel’s defense against Hamas terrorists now that Republicans have suggested dipping into the IRS’s recent funding bump — which the agency will doubtless use to keep targeting conservatives and protecting Democrats — to pay for it.
On Monday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen lashed out at House Republicans for introducing legislation that would provide aid to Israel using a fraction of the taxpayer dollars previously allocated to drastically increase funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). According to Forbes, the $14.3 billion proposal would be paid for by slashing some of “the extra [IRS] funding approved in President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.” The legislation was introduced a little more than a week after the White House proposed a $105 billion spending package that would force Congress to ship more billions to Ukraine as a package deal with U.S. aid to Israel.
For context, the wrongly named “Inflation Reduction Act,” which was passed along party lines by the then-Democrat-controlled Congress last year, earmarked about $80 billion for an increase in IRS funding. These extra billions opened the door for the agency to hire roughly “87,000 additional employees over a decade, doubling the size of its workforce.” As The Federalist’s Elle Purnell previously noted, Democrat claims that the extra funding empowered the agency to “crack down on mega-corporations” fall flat when considering that the majority of IRS audits appear to be targeted towards Republican-friendly states in the South and West.
Meanwhile, there’s a “conspicuous shortage of audits in the Northeast and California,” which are more Democrat-friendly.
“I think if you put [House Republicans’ proposal] to the American people and they weigh the two needs, I think they’re going to say standing with Israel and protecting the innocent over there is in our national interest and is a more immediate need than IRS agents,” newly sworn-in House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told Fox News.
House Republicans’ plan to return IRS spending to levels seen a few years ago didn’t sit too well with Yellen, who took to X to throw a tantrum over the proposal. After conflating support for America’s longstanding Middle Eastern ally with support for a corrupt Ukraine, Yellen baselessly claimed the GOP bill would indirectly “undermine[]” U.S. national security and “weaken our efforts to modernize the IRS – efforts which reduce the deficit, improve customer service for Americans, and make sure that wealthy tax cheats pay what they owe.”
Clearly, the administration’s effort thus far to “modernize” the IRS doesn’t mean shrinking the deficit but rather adding trillions of dollars to the U.S. national debt. In the first two and half years of Joe Biden’s presidency, the national debt rose by $4.8 trillion, going from $27.8 trillion in January 2021 to $32.6 trillion in July 2023.
But the administration’s desperate backlash against House Republicans’ proposal to reallocate a small portion of IRS funding isn’t surprising given that the agency has acted as a political arm of the Democrat Party for years. During the Obama administration, the IRS got busted for intentionally delaying applications for “tax-exempt status from right-of-center organizations” leading up to the 2012 elections. Numbering in the hundreds, these groups were “improperly subjected to baseless investigations, invasive and improper demands about their donors, and lengthy delays in processing routine paperwork.”
The Department of Justice (DOJ) ultimately settled with dozens of these groups in 2017.
More recently, the agency appears to have gone to great lengths to protect the Bidens’ widespread corruption. Earlier this year, an IRS whistleblower revealed that the agency removed he and his “entire investigative team” tasked with working on the Hunter Biden probe at the behest of the DOJ. Hunter, who has publicly admitted for years to being under criminal investigation for tax fraud, was indicted last month on “three felonies related to his unlawful purchase of a firearm in 2018.”
On top of covering for the Bidens, the agency was also the source of an illegal leak of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns. Last week, former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn pled guilty to doing just that, having previously disclosed such information to The New York Times and ProPublica. Littlejohn is slated to receive little more than a slap on the wrist for his crimes.
As The Federalist reported, the DOJ charged Littlejohn with “one count of ‘disclosing tax return information without authorization,’” which normally “carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.” A plea agreement announced by prosecutors, however, recommends the former IRS contractor “serve eight to 14 months in prison and pay a fine of up to $40,000.” A judge will ultimately have the final say on whether the agreement is approved.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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