With his announcement late Wednesday that he’ll appoint former Republican congressman Billy Long of Missouri to lead the Internal Revenue Service, President-elect
Donald Trump is bucking the tradition of allowing IRS commissioners to serve out their full five-year appointments.
Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.
Danny Werfel, nominated for the position by President Joe Biden in 2022, had said that he intends to stay on until 2027 at the tax collection agency, where he has overseen a cash infusion that has increased the size and reach of the agency’s staff while drawing Republican ire.
But now, Werfel’s term may end prematurely.
Long “is an extremely hard worker, and respected by all, especially by those who know him in Congress. Taxpayers and the wonderful employees of the IRS will love having Billy at the helm,” Trump
posted on Truth Social, without mentioning that the role of IRS commissioner is currently filled.
As is the case at the FBI — where Trump
says he will appoint loyalist Kash Patel as director
despite the fact that the director he appointed during his first presidency is still midway through his 10-year term — Trump signaled his intent to choose his own appointee for a job that usually spans administrations.
🏛️
Follow Politics
The law does give the president authority to remove an IRS commissioner at will. But no president has removed an IRS commissioner approved by the Senate since the law creating five-year terms passed in 1998.
Long, 69, did not serve on the tax-writing committee during his six terms in Congress. Since leaving the House to run unsuccessfully for Senate, however, he has focused on taxes, including advising businesses on applying for the Employee Retention Credit. That tax credit, created by Congress to prop up businesses struggling in the early months of the
coronavirus pandemic, has created a
morass of fraudulent claims by ineligible businesses that the IRS is still sorting out.
Change of leadership
Biden
appointed Werfel to serve as IRS commissioner shortly after Congress approved a historic infusion of funding to transform the troubled tax-collection agency. Werfel supervised the use of tens of billions of dollars of money from the Inflation Reduction Act and repeatedly testified on Capitol Hill in defense of keeping the money as Republicans tried to claw it back.
He turned the agency’s focus first to improving customer service, which has resulted in a far smaller backlog of unprocessed returns and shorter wait times for callers, and then to enforcement. He has boasted about collecting billions in taxes owed by
wealthy individuals and
businesses that had not been aggressively audited in recent years and has presided over the hiring of hundreds of auditors.
He also oversaw the creation and launch of
Direct File, the agency’s new website for certain qualifying taxpayers to complete their tax returns free — another target of Republicans who believed the IRS shouldn’t have the authority to compete with private tax prep companies.
“It’s not a surprise by any means that President Trump is choosing to put in his own man. Trump has made that clear for a long time — he’s no fan of the agency,” said Mark Everson, who served as IRS commissioner under President George W. Bush.
Long’s tenure in Congress will be an asset in the job, he added, as the IRS needs to work closely with lawmakers during the next administration, when tax cuts and tax administration will be major issues.
Trump didn’t criticize Werfel or the IRS in his announcement, and he didn’t mention any of his own goals for the IRS.
Nina Olson, who served as national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019, said Trump’s move undermines Congress’s goal when it created five-year terms to ensure “continuity at the head of the revenue-raising function of government, which has had management problems in the past.”
Congress “decided it was probably a good thing for certain agencies like the FBI and the IRS that need to be apolitical to have a director … that lasts long enough for some continuity,” said T. Keith Fogg, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School.
“There’s a lot of law enforcement in these two agencies,” Fogg said.
Democrats criticized the move, with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden of Oregon calling Long “a bizarre choice for this role,” especially given his recent work with Employee Retention Credit applicants. But Republicans emphasized that Trump would be within the rules of the 1998 law to remove an IRS commissioner at will.
“That’s a decision the president gets to make,” said Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, the Republican in line to take over the Finance Committee chairmanship in January.
Trump’s move will increase scrutiny of whether he is interfering in the operations of the IRS for political purposes, said John Koskinen, who was appointed commissioner of the IRS by President Barack Obama. Koskinen came under political fire over the IRS’s handling of conservative organizations and eventually faced an impeachment effort by Republicans — but Trump allowed him to serve out his term when he took office in 2017.
“There’s no Republican or Democratic way to run the tax system and administer it fairly,” Koskinen said. “So this is a change. … You just don’t want people to feel that the IRS is a political entity, and it’s picking and choosing who to go after and who not to go after.”
www.nationalreview.com
