Rep. Greg Pence
WASHINGTON — Rep. Greg Pence, R-Indiana, has voted in favor of a bill that would rescind funding that Congress previously provided the Internal Revenue Service. The measure, however, stands little chance of becoming law.
The bill, which cleared the GOP-controlled House Monday on a party-line vote of 221-210, would rescind nearly $71 billion that Congress provided the agency to help offset the cost of Democrats’ top health and environmental priorities passed last year and to replenish an agency struggling to provide basic services to taxpayers and ensure fairness in tax compliance, The Associated Press reported.
The money is on top of what Congress provides the IRS annually through the appropriations process and immediately became a magnet for GOP campaign ads in the fall claiming that the boost would lead to an army of IRS agents harassing hard-working Americans, according to wire reports.
Shortly before the vote, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that rescinding the extra IRS funding would increase deficits over the coming decade by more than $114 billion.
The measure is unlikely to advance further as the Democratic-controlled Senate has vowed to ignore it.
“Our new Republican Majority in the United States House of Representatives has hit the ground running by enacting the very first item on our agenda,” Pence said in a statement. “By repealing these 87,000 new IRS agents, House Republicans are making it clear to the American people that the federal government will work for them, not the other way around.”
Many GOP lawmakers have routinely say the extra funding will be used to hire 87,000 new agents to target Americans, but that’s misleading, according to wire reports. The number is based on a Treasury Department plan saying that many IRS employees would be hired over the next decade if it got the money. But those employees will not all be hired at the same time, they will not all be auditors and many will be replacing some 50,000 employees who are expected to quit or retire in coming years.
Charles Rettig, the former commissioner of the IRS, said in a final message to the agency in November that the additional money would help in many areas, not just beefing up tax enforcement. He said the investments would make it “even less likely for honest taxpayers to hear from the IRS or receive an audit letter.”
Additional funding for the agency has been politically controversial since 2013, when the IRS under the Obama administration was found to have used inappropriate criteria to review tea party groups and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status, according to wire reports.
In the ensuing years, the IRS was mostly on the losing end of congressional funding fights, even as a subsequent 2017 report found that both conservative and liberal groups were chosen for scrutiny.
In April, Rettig told lawmakers the agency’s budget has decreased by more than 15% over the past decade when accounting for inflation and said the number of full-time employees — 79,000 in the last fiscal year — was close to 1974 levels, according to wire reports.
The AP reported last year that the IRS has lost roughly 50,000 employees over the past five years due to attrition, and that more than half of IRS employees who work in enforcement were currently eligible for retirement.
Pence, however, claimed in a statement that extra money for the IRS “would have done nothing more than audit and harass hardworking Americans and small businesses.”
“Last year Democrats expanded the federal government in order to weaponize it against its citizens,” Pence said in a statement. “Some 87,000 new agents — which would have made the IRS one of the largest federal agencies — would have done nothing more than audit and harass hardworking Americans and small businesses. That means our Hoosier farmers, local restaurants, barbershops and many more would have been prime targets of the IRS.”
The White House said President Joe Biden would veto the bill if it gets to his desk, saying that the wealthiest 1% of Americans hide about 20% of their income so they don’t have to pay taxes on it, shifting more of the tax burden to the middle class, according to wire reports.
“With their first economic legislation of the new Congress, House Republicans are making clear that their top economic priority is to allow the rich and multibillion-dollar corporations to skip out on their taxes, while making life harder for ordinary, middle-class families that pay the taxes they owe,” the White House said.
