DOGE to effectively end federal tax enforcement
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Even before the upper class gets its de jure tax cut, it’s getting a big de facto one:
I didn’t know this until this morning. And I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more press attention. We know that DOGE is in the process of gutting the IRS. According to internal IRS estimates reviewed by The Washington Post, this internal sabotage is already estimated to have cost the U.S. Treasury more than $500 billion in revenues that otherwise would have been raised by April 15th. But it doesn’t stop at the IRS. DOGE is also in the process of essentially closing down the Tax Division at the Department of Justice.
Since the Tax Division is a statutory creation, it can’t literally be shuttered. As DOGE has done at numerous other offices and agencies, the entity is kept notionally alive in a zombie state of suspended animation: a few employees, a desk lamp and a couple workstations. That’s the legal fig leaf that allows the White House, with a compliant judiciary, to say that it hasn’t violated any congressional statute or terminated one of Congress’ creations. It’s simply choosing a new strategy of enforcement.
What they plan to do is essentially “reform” and “reorganize” the Tax Division out of existence. The plan is to dramatically reduce the number of Tax Division staff attorneys and then take the great majority of those that remain and disperse them out to the country’s 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices. Only a small managerial layer is to be left working from Washington, DC. In the nature of things, the most experienced lawyers in the division will be those with families and roots in the Washington, DC area. So presumably quite a few of them won’t be willing to relocate to offices around the country. If they’re replaced it will be with new hires without the institutional experience of their predecessors. Like a body sliced into a hundred pieces, it will simply shrivel and die. And that, more or less, will be the end of the Tax Division. I’m told this is likely to be announced next week, on April 14th.
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When you combine this with the gutting of the IRS itself, it basically means a radical diminution of tax enforcement in the United States. If you make more than, say, a million dollars a year, paying taxes is probably going to be voluntary going forward.
It’s a new feature of billionairedom.
When you combine this with the Trump tariffs, this means both much less tax revenue and a much more regressive taxation structure. Bad news for those trying to sanewash the tariffs as a debt reduction strategy, outstanding news for billionaires. The new Republican economic populism!