House passes repeal of IRS funding 221-210 in first legislative vote of new Congress

WASHINGTON (TND) — The House of Representatives voted 221-210 Monday night to repeal parts of the Inflation Reduction Act that will provide the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) an additional $80 billion in funding over the next 10 years.

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., celebrated the first successful passage of legislation by his newly empowered, majority Republican caucus by proclaiming “promises made” as he gaveled through the legislation.

If last week’s chaotic saga for a speaker — taking 15 ballots over the course of five days — was extraordinary for the House, the debate over the Republican’s repeal bill marked a standard return to regular order. Both literally, as parliamentary procedure kept the debate rolling at the standard pace, and more figuratively as lawmakers from both sides of the aisle hurled insults, attacks, figures and some occasional facts at each other and around the chamber in support or condemnation of the legislation.

Most of the Republican rationale for the bill centered around the number 87,000. Conservative lawmakers claimed that the Biden administration wanted to give the IRS the tens of billions of dollars of funding in order to “raise an army” of new IRS agents to harass and persecute millions of American citizens and small businesses. Many Republicans claimed that such money and such numbers of employees would be better spent and sourced for border patrol amid the ongoing crisis at the southern border.

However, this point about an "army" of IRS auditors is largely based on fiction, The National Desk’s Ahtra Elnashar reported Monday.

Despite Republican claims of the creation of an ‘army’ of agents,” she said, “the funds would go toward staff in all departments like those who process returns, program computers and audit returns.

In a fact check, the New York Times points out that this number is based on an estimate from May 2021 from the Treasury department of how many total employees the IRS can hire over the next 10 years with the funding.

In fact, Elnashar’s reporting shows that the IRS itself has a deficit in the total number of agents — auditors of individual and small business taxes as well as others looking into financial crimes, tax dodgers, corporate tax abuse, etc. — in the current time. She cites a blog post by Chuck Marr, a vice president for federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities think-tank, in which he lays out the current investigative IRS landscape.

"The last time the IRS had fewer revenue agents than it has today was in 1953,” Marr wrote. “Today’s economy is seven times larger than it was in 1953 and our population has more than doubled since then. Today’s tax returns of wealthy people and large multinationals are more complex and global, which take more time for auditors to review.”

Indeed as many Democrats pointed out with impassioned and sometimes agitated rhetoric in the floor debate, much of the Biden administration’s effort to close the tax gap, which refers to the amount of revenue in taxes that goes unpaid — the gap between 2014 and 2016 was around $28 billion, according to IRS data.

House Republicans now want to repeal that and let some super-wealthy people pay less in taxes than many hard-working Americans — including through outright tax fraud — which would increase the deficit and worsen inflation," the White House said in a statement released before the vote on Monday.

The bill is not expected to pass the Senate, where Democrats hold a majority 51-49, or past President Joe Biden’s desk due to his veto power. Much like Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as “Obamacare," from 2011 to 2016, this first exercise in majority power seemed to be an exercise in futility.