Article by Tristan Justice in The Federalist
Missouri AG Sends Letter To IRS Demanding Army Of New Agents Back Off
On Sunday, Senate Democrats passed their latest colossal spending bill which authorizes the IRS to hire 87,000 new agents.
Missouri Attorney General and Republican Senate candidate Eric Schmitt sent a letter to the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Wednesday demanding the agency back off plans to hire an army of potentially militarized agents.
“The people of Missouri love our country,” Schmitt wrote, “but, with every passing day, we find more reasons to fear our government.”
On Sunday, Senate Democrats passed their latest colossal spending bill which authorizes and funds the hire of nearly 87,000 new IRS agents.
“To put this in perspective,” Schmitt wrote, “the IRS will be larger than the FBI, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Border Patrol combined.”
These 87,000 agents are expected to conduct more than one million new audits, which will affect Missourians of all income levels. The thought of 87,000 new IRS agents terrorizing Missourians is disturbing to say the least. The main role of the federal government is to protect our borders and provide security to our citizens against foreign governments … not to find new ways to extract more hard earned money from the people of this great nation.
On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sought to downplay fears of an entire stadium’s worth of federal agents combing through middle- and lower-income Americans’ finances.
here is an 87,000 person stadium (the number of IRS agents biden just forced you to hire) pic.twitter.com/A5vp5wXwpx
— Mike Solana (@micsolana) August 8, 2022
As Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi pointed out Thursday, however, “nothing in the bill that Democrats passed through the Senate limits audits” after Democrats such as Connecticut’s Chris Murphy claimed low-income earners would not be audited at higher rates.
“Murphy, along with every other Democrat in the Senate,” Harsanyi noted, “voted against a Republican amendment that would have prevented new agents from auditing individuals and small businesses with less than $400,000 of taxable income.”
In his letter to Commissioner Rettig Thursday, Schmitt took particular issue with a since-deleted agency job posting wherein applicants should be prepared to “carry a firearm” and be “willing to use deadly force.”
“Even more troubling is the militarization of the IRS,” Schmitt wrote, highlighting the revenue service’s possession of “more than 5 million rounds of ammunition to use in its rifles, shotguns, pistols and submachine guns. … No tax collection agency needs such firepower.”
Schmitt pointed to the 2013 tax scandal when the IRS was caught applying undue scrutiny to conservative groups under disgraced ex-director of the Exempt Organizations Unit Lois Lerner.
“We still remember clearly how the IRS under Lois Lerner abused its power against political opponents of the last Democratic administration,” Schmitt wrote, adding the Biden White House has only escalated its political warfare with an FBI raid of former President Donald Trump on Monday.
“The real message sent by the federal government to the people of this country through the actions of its agents in the FBI, the Department of Justice, and increasingly militarized IRS is crystal clear,” Schmitt added. “The Regime is in control and will investigate and punish anyone who stands in its way.”
The last decade has shown the IRS is far from immune from the politicization of beltway institutions weaponized to persecute political dissidents. A report from Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) raises further cause for concern.
According to the conservative tax group, the agency’s 87,000 new agents will belong to a union which gave 100 percent of its 2022 Political Action Committee (PAC) donations to Democrats. Nearly 99 percent of its federal candidate spending also went to Democrats.
