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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

By Jill Filipovic

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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At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.

Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”

Democrats talk a big game about “inclusion,” but as Buttigieg notes, they don’t produce a message that feels inclusive to most voters, because they’re too focused on appealing to the very nonrepresentative set of people who make up the party apparatus. Adam Frisch—a moderate Democrat who ran two strong campaigns for Congress in a red district in western Colorado but got little traction among DNC members when he sought to be elected as vice chair of the party—wrote about his own experience in the DNC campaign. He noted how just about the only people he’d encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were “the impressive delegates from the High School Democrats of America.” Frisch lost out to two candidates who were much better positioned to speak to the very highly educated, very left-wing electorate that is the DNC membership: State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, a “champion for social justice” who has lost multiple statewide campaigns in Pennsylvania by doing his best impression of Elizabeth Warren; and David Hogg, the dim-bulb gun-control advocate who still seems to think “Defund the Police” is good politics. Speaking of things that seem like they came out of Portlandia: Hogg believes that the gun-control movement was “started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous lgbtq women and nonbinary people that never got on the news or in most history books.”

Yet Buttigieg pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the people who have led Democrats down this road of being off-putting and unpopular.

[Read: The HR-ification of the Democratic party]

These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped. And although DEI-speak can and does make Democrats seem weird and out of touch, that’s not the main problem with it. The big problem with the approach Buttigieg rightly complains about—and that Kenyatta and Hogg exemplify—is that it entails a strong set of mistaken moral commitments. These have led the party to take unpopular positions on crime, immigration, and education, among other issues. Many nonwhite voters correctly perceive these positions as hostile to their substantive interests.

What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them according to how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are because of those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences of the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent. That is, they decide that some people are more important than others, and then they don’t even correctly assess the desires of the people they have decided are most important.

Let’s look, for example, at what progressive Democrats have to offer to Asian voters—or, as a DNC member might say, “AANHPI voters.” On higher education, Democrats advocate for race-conscious admission policies that favor “underrepresented” groups and disfavor “overrepresented” ones. In practice, those policies have meant that Asian applicants must clear higher academic bars than white applicants—and much higher bars than Black and Latino applicants—to win admission to top schools. Progressives have also responded to demographic imbalances at selective public K–12 education programs (which are disproportionately Asian) by fighting to change the admission systems. In New York, progressives sought to to abolish the admission exam, which Asian students have dominated; in San Francisco, where the city’s most prestigious magnet school has become majority-Asian, they actually did away with the exam for a time; in Fairfax County, Virginia, they changed admission rules to be less favorable to Asian applicants. Within schools, they have opposed tracking and fought to remove advanced math courses, “leveling” the playing field by reducing the level of rigor available to the highest-performing students.

Democrats see Asian Americans disproportionately getting ahead in school as an “inequitable” outcome, so they try to stack the deck against them. Not a great pitch to the Asian community.

Of course, I’m sure Democrats who favor affirmative action would say that framing is very unfair. But these are the same people who keep telling us we need to focus on the effects of actions rather than intentions. When Democrats get control of education policy, they make changes that hurt Asians. Is it any kind of surprise that, as Democrats have become ever more obsessed with racial “equity” as a policy driver, Asian voters have swung hard against the party? Is it surprising that Republicans—in spite of overt racism among some operatives and activists in the party—have made strong inroads among Asian voters? I don’t find it surprising, given that Democrats are the party of official discrimination against Asians.

[Read: Democrats deserved to lose]

Or consider Democrats’ approach to crime. Progressives’ insistence on using marginalization as a marker of moral worth has led them to prioritize the needs of people who are engaged in antisocial behavior over those of ordinary citizens who abide by the social contract. After all, few people are more marginalized than criminals, or the “justice-involved,” as a DNC member might call them. As progressives have grown skeptical of police and policing, they have made it more difficult to detain dangerous defendants ahead of trial, and they have de facto (and sometimes de jure) decriminalized nuisances such as public drug use. These policies, combined with the effects of COVID and the George Floyd protests, have led to an increase in crime and disorder in cities. This has been unpopular. And because major cities are disproportionately nonwhite, the negative effects of the disorder have fallen disproportionately on nonwhite voters. So it makes sense that diverse cities swung harder against Democrats than did whiter suburbs, where physical distance has insulated the electorate.

On immigration, similarly, Democrats are excessively focused on the interests of the most marginalized group in the policy equation—foreign migrants—even though these migrants are not citizens and not really stakeholders in our politics. The Biden administration presided over the entry of millions of migrants into the country in a way that was not in accordance with any intentionally enacted public policy. It did this with the enthusiastic support of progressive groups that purport to speak for the interests of Latinos. But the broader population of Latinos reacted—surprise!—quite negatively to the migration wave, as they watched migrants receive expensive government services, overwhelm institutions of local government, and in some cases produce crime and disorder. Some of the hardest-swinging counties against Democrats from 2020 to 2024 were overwhelmingly Latino counties on the U.S.-Mexico border. If you wanted to predict how the migration wave would affect the Hispanic American vote, you would have done better to focus on the “American” aspect of their identity rather than on the “Hispanic” part; as it turns out, long-settled Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans don’t necessarily put a high premium on ensuring that our government spends a ton of money to house and care for economic migrants from Central and South America.

So the problem here is not really the $10 words. Consider the term BIPOC. This (decreasingly?) fashionable buzzword—which means either “Black and Indigenous people of color” or “Black, Indigenous, and people of color,” depending on whom you ask—contains a clear message about how progressives view the hierarchy of marginalization: Black Americans and Native Americans outrank Latinos and Asians. It seems that the message has been received: In 2024, Democrats hemorrhaged support from Latinos and Asians. But the problem can’t be fixed by dropping BIPOC from the vocabulary. To stop the bleeding, Democrats need to abandon the toxic issue positions they took because they have the sort of worldview that caused them to say “BIPOC” in the first place.

[Read: How to move on from the worst of identity politics]

Democrats should say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. They should say that the U.S. government should primarily focus on the needs of U.S. citizens, and that a sad story about deprivation in a foreign country isn’t a sufficient reason for being admitted to the United States and put up in a New York hotel at taxpayer expense. They should say that the pullback from policing has been a mistake. They should say that they were wrong and they are sorry! After all, Democrats talk easily about how the party has gotten “out of touch,” but they don’t draw the obvious connection about what happens when you’re out of touch: You get things substantively wrong and alienate voters with your unpopular ideas. To fix that, you have to change more than how you talk—you have to change what you stand for, and stand up to those in the party who oppose that change.

Even better, you can nominate people who never took those toxic and unpopular issue positions in the first place.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.