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At the close of his RNC speech accepting his party’s nomination for vice president in July, then-Senator J. D. Vance lingered on the specific patch of earth where he hoped he would one day be buried.

“Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law-school debt and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in eastern Kentucky,” he said, recounting how he had proposed to his wife, Usha. If they were to eventually be interred there, he explained, they would mark the sixth generation of his family buried in the region he called his “ancestral home”: Appalachia.

Since the release of his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s ties to Appalachia have been a perennial topic of discussion. His connection to the region, some assumed, conferred credibility to speak on behalf of Americans who felt they had been left behind, in Appalachia and elsewhere; many saw in his book’s depiction of poverty and addiction an explanation for why the “white working class” had fled the Democratic Party and backed Donald Trump in such great numbers. Others pointed out that Vance had in fact grown up in Middletown, Ohio, about 200 miles away from his family’s “ancestral home” and burial plot; they bristled at his bootstrap politics and claimed that Hillbilly Elegy didn’t reflect the Appalachia they knew.

In advance of the 2024 election, the debate over Vance’s identity returned with heightened stakes. Donald Trump had picked Vance as his running mate at least in part because his “hillbilly” credentials could appeal to the voters his book purported to represent. Then, of course, there was the factual matter: Appalachia, many assumed, was a region like New England or the Pacific Northwest; you were either from there, or you weren’t. The day after Vance’s nomination-acceptance speech, the New York Times standards desk weighed in, issuing guidance to its staff that clarified that he was not “from Appalachia.” The memo, obtained by the reporter Justin Baragona, concludes by cautioning journalists against “anything that suggests he grew up there or is a son of Appalachia.”

But ever since it was first defined as a region in the late 19th century, Appalachia has always existed as much in myth as in literal geography. A simple adjudication of Vance’s ties overlooks a complicated history of what “being Appalachian” really means in America.

The term Appalachian America is believed to have been coined by William Goodell Frost, an Ohio educator who served as president of Kentucky’s Berea College from 1892 to 1920. Berea had been founded by an abolitionist and was intended to function as a racially integrated, coeducational liberal-arts college, the first in the South. But after a 1904 Kentucky law required that schools in the state be segregated, Frost pivoted the college’s mission toward educating the population he had called, in an 1899 Atlantic essay, “our contemporary ancestors”—the white inhabitants of Kentucky’s mountainous east. In his article, Frost recounts traveling through the area and being shocked by how its inhabitants lived. With their rudimentary homes and blood feuds, the mountain folk were, in his words, “an anachronism.” “Appalachian America may be useful as furnishing a fixed point which enables us to measure the progress of the moving world!” he wrote. He had invented a region, one principally defined not by its place on a map but by its position in history: the past.

Over the next decades, Frost’s conception gelled in the American mind. Appalachia came to represent an area spread loosely across the mountain range of the same name—portions of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee—but distinguished (at least in the eyes of outsiders) by its backwardness. In one 1929 Atlantic story, the writer Charles Morrow Wilson suggested that the region remained trapped in Elizabethan England, with a dialect and social mores that were centuries out of date. And in the 1960s, the Kentucky lawyer Harry M. Caudill turbocharged Frost’s ideas with a series of Atlantic articles and best-selling books that helped make the region synonymous with poverty.

Caudill, not unlike Vance, became an overnight celebrity. The success of his books, his son James told me, drew visitors from all across the country and even abroad; they were eager to see the desperation he described up close, and an obliging Caudill led “poverty tours” through the valleys around Whitesburg, where he lived. Caudill’s writing fleshed out stereotypes for the people Frost had diagnosed as backward: They were poor but scrappy, suspicious of outsiders but fiercely loyal to their families, unsophisticated but endowed with a certain sort of folk wisdom.

Driven in part by Caudill’s writing, Congress finally affixed Appalachia to a map in 1965, creating the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and tasking it with dispersing federal funds across a list of counties deemed sufficiently Appalachian. With money up for grabs, states wanted in. Included in the commission’s charter are decidedly mountainless counties in northern Mississippi; an advocate for the state had even submitted a doctored map as evidence, drawing in mountains with a fine-point pen. The ARC’s list of counties, which stretches from Mississippi into upstate New York, constitutes America’s “official” definition of Appalachia today.

It’s true that Vance’s hometown isn’t included in the ARC’s charter, which the Times memo references to justify classifying Vance as not “from” the region. But the charter’s list is so expansive as to be meaningless. In a 1981 survey of college students in and around the ARC’s definition of Appalachia, fewer than 20 percent identified New York and Mississippi as part of the region.

Perhaps whether or not Americans consider someone to be “from” Appalachia has less to do with where that person grew up on a map than with their embodiment or rejection of the myths we associate with the region—and, at least in some cases, with how those myths can serve our political priorities. One popular T-shirt in support of the Trump-Vance ticket read “It’s Gonna Take a Felon and a Hillbilly to Fix This,” as if the experience of Appalachian hardship afforded Vance a unique ability to tame inflation. But to strip from Vance his Appalachianness is to make a political argument, too—that his perspective is closer to that of the Silicon Valley billionaires with whom he associates than an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia.

At the RNC, Vance invoked his Appalachian burial ground to challenge the notion that America was built on an idea; instead, he argued, you were an American if your ancestors had been buried in America, and if, over generations, they had fought and died for America. “That’s not just an idea, my friends; that’s not just a set of principles,” he said. “That is a homeland—that is our homeland.” He used his ties to the land to make a political argument of his own, to advance a nationalism rooted in the soil of a cemetery plot and the bones of the people buried there. His rejection of America as a nation of ideas was itself based on an idea—that of Appalachia.

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Americans love to hate the IRS, that historically unpopular revenue-collection agency with its slow processes and fax machines and many, many forms. But recently, it has started to turn things around, at least by some measures: After receiving tens of billions of dollars from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the agency’s customer-service wait times went down, its tech initiatives helped simplify tax filings for some, and its audits led to the recovery of more than $1 billion in unpaid taxes from wealthy Americans and corporations.

That progress may now be imperiled. As part of the Trump administration’s plan to downsize the federal government, the IRS has been ordered to start firing as many as 7,000 IRS employees in the middle of tax season, including 5,000 people who work on collection and enforcement; the total cuts represent about 7 percent of the agency’s workforce. More layoffs could come: Today, the Trump administration released a memo ordering all federal agencies to submit plans to eliminate more positions, including those of career officials with civil-service protection. The IRS’s acting commissioner, Doug O’Donnell, announced his retirement this week, and Billy Long, Donald Trump’s pick to replace him, has previously backed legislation that would abolish the IRS.

To imagine the future of a diminished IRS, look back to the 2010s. By 2017, the agency’s workforce had shrunk by roughly 14 percent compared with 2010. The agency’s audit rate was 42 percent lower in 2017 than in 2010. In that period, Americans saw slower refunds and delayed call times. There is a tendency to conflate efficiency with cost cutting, and sometimes leaner operations really do speed things up—but if the IRS can’t afford to update its arcane technology or hire skilled professionals, Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told me, it may struggle to operate efficiently.

In a shift of focus, the IRS has prioritized auditing wealthy people and corporations since receiving IRA funding. In 2022, The Washington Post reported that more than half of the IRS’s audits in 2021 targeted taxpayers whose incomes were less than $75,000, because those audits are simpler and can be automated; auditing wealthy people’s tax returns can require far more resources, especially if they have varied income streams and assets (and sophisticated lawyers or accountants). In May, former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel announced that the agency would drastically ramp up its audits of wealthy corporations and people making more than $10 million. The taxes that rich people evade each year amount to more than $150 billion, he told CNBC in 2024. Investigating them could pay off: A 2023 paper estimated that every dollar the agency spends on audits of wealthy people could translate to $12 in recovered funds. And those who see their peers getting audited may be discouraged from cheating on taxes in the future, Williamson noted.

For generations, politicians have sought to politicize the IRS: In 1971, President Richard Nixon reportedly said that he wanted a new commissioner to “go after our enemies and not go after our friends,” and a former Trump chief of staff told The New York Times that Trump spoke of using the IRS to investigate his rivals during his first term (Trump denied this). The agency’s politicization and unpopularity was part of a “cycle that I hoped we had finally broken,” Natasha Sarin, a law professor at Yale and a former counselor at the Treasury, told me. When an agency struggles to perform its job well, its unpopularity makes getting more funding to improve its operations harder, and so forth.

The future of a major effort to improve the tax-filing system is uncertain too. As my colleague Saahil Desai explained last year, the agency’s pilot of a new, free tax-filing program, Direct File, was “a glimpse of a world where government tech benefits millions of Americans.” That the program “exists at all is shocking,” Saahil wrote. “That it’s pretty good is borderline miraculous.” Elon Musk posted earlier this month that he had “deleted” 18F, the government tech initiative that helped launch Direct File (though Direct File, now under the auspices of the IRS, will continue to accept tax returns for now). And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, in his confirmation hearing, that Direct File would operate this year, but added that he would “study” it for future use.

Staffing—this year and in future filing seasons—is another concern: Janet Holtzblatt, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, recommended that taxpayers file as soon as possible, because the IRS workforce may only continue to diminish if some of the remaining employees leave for new jobs, which could lead to tax-refund delays. Many of those who are left are also close to retiring. Before 2022, more than 60 percent of the IRS’s employees were reaching retirement age over the next six years, Holtzblatt told me. A new cohort of younger, more digitally savvy workers (many of whom were probationary agents) was gearing up to replace them. “The long-term effects are potentially worse than what might happen this year,” she said.

More mass layoffs and funding reductions could mean a shrunken and defanged IRS. If the agency doesn’t have the resources it needs to modernize and tamp down tax evasion, revenue won’t be the only thing affected—Americans’ already-shaky trust in the system could be too.

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Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Adolescent Style in American Politics

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To a certain kind of guy, Donald Trump epitomizes masculine cool. He’s ostentatiously wealthy. He’s married to his third model wife. He gets prime seats at UFC fights, goes on popular podcasts, and does more or less whatever he wants without consequences. That certain kind of guy who sees Trump as a masculine ideal? That guy is a teenage boy.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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