“For the second straight year, President Biden and the Democrats are poised to sacrifice a significant chunk of one of their biggest accomplishments,” one critic lamented.

Economic justice advocates are urging House Democrats to do more to defend Internal Revenue Service funding after leaders of the minority party agreed to Republican draft legislation that would continue a freeze on more than $20 billion in IRS modernization and enforcement funds in order to avert a government shutdown.

The $20.2 billion freeze is part of a continuing resolution that would guarantee funding for the federal government through March 14. Although the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022 allocated $80 billion in supplemental funding to the IRS, Congress subsequently rescinded $21.6 billion of that and added a rider for the $20.2 billion freeze in an earlier continuing resolution.

The freeze means that the funds are neither permanently rescinded nor available for use. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the effective $20.2 billion funding reduction would increase the federal deficit by $46 billion “due to a drop in the agency’s capacity to enforce taxes on wealthy individuals owed under existing federal law.”

As Dylan Gyauch-Lewis wrote Wednesday for The American Prospect, “For the second straight year, President Biden and the Democrats are poised to sacrifice a significant chunk of one of their biggest accomplishments: funding for the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats.”

“With the latest maneuver, more than 90% of the money invested to scale up IRS auditing and oversight could be gone before it can even be used,” Gyauch-Lewis added. “Yet again, Democrats seem to have been outplayed by Republican leadership.”

Common Dream’s work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

  democrats, funding, gop, irs