All five Republicans in Virginia’s congressional delegation have spread a repeatedly debunked claim this month that President Joe Biden is planning to sic 87,000 Internal Revenue Service agents on taxpayers.
Their inaccurate statements came during the days surrounding a Jan. 9 party-line vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to strip $71 billion from the IRS budget over the next 10 years. The measure, one of the first actions by Republicans since they took charge of the House on Jan. 3, has little chance of passing the Democrat-controlled Senate. The White House has said Biden will veto it if it reaches his desk.
The claim about legions of new IRS agents has been a national GOP talking point since mid-2022, when Congress (then fully under Democratic control) was advancing a broad inflation reduction act that appropriated an additional $80 billion over a decade to modernize the IRS. Among those repeatedly making the claim is new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
The “87,000 IRS agents” figure comes from a May 2021 Treasury Department assessment of how it would use $80 billion to improve IRS operations. The report said the IRS would add 86,852 full-time equivalent positions as part of those improvements. The White House hasn’t released a specific plan for how those IRS funds would be spent, but slightly more than half — $45.6 billion over 10 years — would be spent on tax enforcement.
In other words, not all of the projected hires would be tax enforcement agents. Many will...
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