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Setting aside character and judgment issues—and apparent hostility toward the organizations they’re being asked to run—what ties many of Trump’s Cabinet nominees together is a total lack of leadership experience or expertise relevant to the organizations they seek to lead. This is nowhere more evident than in Trump’s nominee to lead the IRS, Billy Long, a former auctioneer and congressman who has shown unswerving loyalty to Trump.
Now, everyone loves to hate the IRS. So maybe, you might think, putting someone in charge with no relevant experience could be a good thing. Heck, if the IRS audits fewer people, maybe we’ll all get a self-help tax cut. The Wall Street Journal editorial board claims Long can curb spending and boost security. How could that be bad?
The truth is that having an adequately funded and well-run IRS is as important to our country as having an adequately funded and well-run Department of Defense. The IRS doesn’t just collect the revenue needed to fund defense and other direct spending. It also administers a large chunk of the country’s social policy. Some $1.7 trillion in support for families, businesses, and individual Americans comes through the IRS every year.
For instance, one of our most effective poverty relief programs is the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax break that initially increases as income does too, creating an incentive to work. (The credit decreases gradually at a certain level of income, ensuring that only those who need the help get it.) The IRS oversees that.
Tax credits for electric vehicles, hospitals, and a host of energy-related initiatives? The IRS oversees those too. The agency is also responsible for drafting and implementing the complicated rules governing IRAs and 401(k) savings plans. Simply put, the tax code touches on every aspect of American life, and we need a well-run IRS to ensure that the policies Congress enacts and entrusts to the IRS are properly administered. Of course, stability and well-run agencies do not seem to be a priority for this administration. Rather than support the IRS, the government is attempting to decimate it through buyouts.
But it’s a big agency, with 90,000 employees and a $14 billion annual budget.
Which brings me to Long’s (lack of) qualifications. For fun, I took a look at the last few confirmed IRS commissioners, appointed by both Republicans and Democrats, dating back to 2003. Mark Everson, appointed by George W. Bush, had served in multiple leadership roles in the federal government, including at the Office of Management and Budget, as well as in the private sector. Douglas Shulman, also a Bush appointee, had served as a senior policy adviser and chief of staff on the National Commission on Restructuring the IRS before being appointed commissioner. John Koskinen, appointed by Barack Obama, had significant executive experience. Charles P. Rettig, appointed by Trump, was a tax lawyer who had led the California State Bar’s tax section and been president of the American College of Tax Counsel, among other tax-related activities. Danny Werfel, who stepped down upon Trump’s inauguration, had formerly served as acting commissioner. You get the idea.
In contrast, Trump’s current nominee, Long, has little leadership experience beyond running his own auction company in Missouri. In Congress, he served on various subcommittees of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, the Committee on Homeland Security, and the Republican Steering Committee, never in a leadership position. What’s missing from this list? Any experience with the tax system.
But wait, you say, he claims to be a “Certified Business and Tax Advisor.” It turns out he got at most three days of sales training after leaving Congress so that he could promote the Employee Retention Tax Credit, which Congress created to help businesses weather the pandemic, and which has been a magnet for fraudsters and a massive headache for the IRS. I’m not sure this is the kind of experience with the tax system we’re looking for in the next IRS commissioner. Nor is the fact that he was one of 144 co-sponsors of a bill to terminate the tax code and replace it with … something better? … as well as another bill to eliminate the estate tax.
The tax gap—the amount owed but not collected—currently stands at about $696 billion per year. We should want a commissioner dedicated to ensuring that the government collects all the taxes that are owed. Doing so would be a great first step in addressing the deficit or paying for a rate cut.
There’s also the matter of progress for the agency itself. After years of cuts to the IRS budget, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 allocated about $80 billion to the IRS over a 10-year window so that it could update its systems and improve operations. Since then, Republicans have clawed back about $21 billion of it and promise to get another $20 billion this year. While cutting spending sounds smart if you’re worried about the deficit, enforcement is one of the few areas where more spending yields even more revenue. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that each dollar spent on collections could yield between $5 and $9 dollars in additional revenues. In other words, it is fiscally responsible to spend more money on the IRS, not less.
Republicans have tried to make Democrats the party of “defund the police,” but advocates of cutting the IRS’s budget are doing just that. This is not to suggest that the IRS could not be reformed and made more efficient. But cutting its budget is not the way to get there. To repeat, the IRS needs more resources, not fewer.
If you are an employee with some investments, don’t for a minute think that less spending on enforcement will let you off the hook. To borrow a phrase from Ronald Reagan, the government takes a “trust but verify” approach to the most common forms of income, requiring employers, banks, investment brokers, and others to report our income on W-2s and 1099s. That isn’t going away.
Instead, those who are most likely to evade detection are the people trying to hide their income in tax shelters, shifting their profits overseas, exaggerating their business deductions, or overvaluing their charitable donations. Are we supposed to applaud that?
“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” George W. Bush infamously said to the former lawyer for the Arabian Horse Association, whom he had appointed to run FEMA, on his handling of the government’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Sometimes it’s not easy to see when expertise is needed. Other times, the risks are painfully clear. Donald Trump’s nomination of Long to be the next IRS commissioner would seem to be the latter.
