A new DOGE disaster is coming with tax enforcers at the Justice Department | Opinion
Sometimes it is hard to tell, but Donald Trump loves government workers — at least some of them. He is a fan of the guys and gals who keep our border closed, collect the tariffs and march in the military parade he is planning for his birthday. His voters are fans of other parts of the government, like the guys who hand out agricultural subsidies, Social Security checks and Medicare Advantage cards.
All of those folks have at least one thing in common: Their jobs are paid for by your taxes. But now, the Department of Government Efficiency is planning to gut the Internal Revenue Service, which collects those taxes.
My friend, Josh Marshall, founder of TalkingPointsMemo, reports that there also are plans in the works to demolish the Justice Department Tax Enforcement Division by emptying its offices, sending the lawyers to work for local U.S. attorneys and leaving a skeleton crew in place to do the minimum work required by law.
That alone is a disaster. The people being stripped of their roles are the folks who give U.S. tax law teeth in civil and criminal court. If you don’t pay, in times past, you had to fear that elite bulldog attorneys from the Tax Enforcement Division were coming for you. Not anymore, apparently.
The value of these attorneys is not just in the fact that they collect more in revenue than they cost every year, but that their presence keeps many people from cheating or even ignoring their taxes altogether. Just this week, a man from Florida who drove around in a Rolls Royce was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for failing to pay $1.7 million in taxes thanks to the Tax Enforcement crew.
Moreover, they are also the folks who bring down the hammer when accountants and tax preparers take advantage of the system. Last week a federal court, at Tax Enforcement’s urging, shut down a bunch of shady tax preparers in Detroit who helped people cheat on their taxes.
Don’t like people who fraudulently steal government benefits? These guys enforce the law for giveaways in the tax code. A couple months ago, it was Tax Enforcement lawyers who brought a Las Vegas woman to justice for stealing stealing $100 million in COVID-19 tax credits.
You’d think the DOGE kids would love this kind of efficient government looking out for your interests. You’d think that Trump, in particular, would like their role in prosecuting identity theft that involves stealing people’s tax refunds by filing fraudulent tax returns. That’s a crime often connected to the undocumented immigrants our president so dislikes.
I am not a fan of paying my taxes. I pay as little as I can, which is still a bunch. But I want everybody to pay their fair share. That’s the only way a country like ours can work and popular things like the military, Social Security and Medicare can be paid for.
The DOGE effort to cut the folks who make tax collection an efficient reality will come around to bite us all in the end. I might not like them, but I was sure glad they were there.
This story was originally published April 10, 2025 at 4:04 AM with the headline "A new DOGE disaster is coming with tax enforcers at the Justice Department | Opinion."
