The Internal Revenue Service is already putting its cash infusion to use, hiring 4,000 customer service representatives from the new funding it received as part of the Democrats’ major climate change, health care and tax legislation.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law in August, will—with great notoriety—provide $80 billion to the tax agency over the next 10 years. A 2021 Treasury Department report suggested IRS could use the funding to hire up to 87,000 employees, which generated significant backlash—and significant backlash to the backlash.

Republican lawmakers cited the figure to highlight their opposition to the bill and to suggest Democrats were ushering in a new wave of audits and other IRS-initiated harassment. The hiring will not, in practice, grow the size of the IRS as much as the bill’s detractors have claimed: much of it will go to backfilling vacancies and replacing the up to 50,000 employees expected to leave the agency in the next few years.

Still, IRS has targeted customer service employees in its first swath of new hires. The agency expects to add another 1,000 to similar positions by the end of the year.

"The IRS is fully committed to providing the best service possible, and we are moving quickly to use new funding to help taxpayers during the busy tax season," said now former IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig, who stepped down from his post on Friday. "Our phone lines have been simply overwhelmed during the pandemic, and we...

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