The Left’s Next Move: Double the IRS

The Left is trying to double the power of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). While the $600 threshold may have been stripped from the budget reconciliation bill, for now, Congress has not gotten rid of doubling the size and funding for the IRS in this bill. What exactly would this mean? An increased funding of $80 billion and adding 87,000 new enforcement agents. They are creating an entirely new bureaucracy to have the bandwidth to spy on every single American.

ACLJ Chief Counsel, and my dad, Jay Sekulow, explained what is still left in this bill:

What is really troubling here in this bill is that while this $600 threshold may be eliminated . . . you get 87,000 new agents . . . this is going to increase the IRS’s ability to be intrusive into your lives. Take that also with the fact that this same bill has a provision in it that also strips any kind of this funding that is going to go to infrastructure, cannot go to religious institutions. So, it can’t go to a church that needs to increase its childcare facilities to help its local community. . . . This bill is chock-full of problems, but the top of the problem is $8 billion to the IRS a year doubles in essence; you know, 80 percent of their budgets increase. It is going to create nothing but havoc. We know the intent was . . . and the intent was you get into everybody’s individual checking account.

Even with the elimination of the $600 threshold, doubling the size of the IRS is essentially going to lead to the same problems. ACLJ Director of Government Affairs Thann Bennett reiterated the ramifications of this bill for everyday Americans:

It is just another way of accomplishing the exact same thing. . . . Out of that $80 billion, about $45 billion would be targeted for enforcement and used to hire approximately 87,000 new agents. It’s a little bit scarier even than that. . . . If that $45 billion was used to hire 87,000 agents, do you know what the annual budget for each of those agents would be to enforce tax law? It would be about $515,000 for every one of those agents. If that’s not another way of accomplishing the very same thing, I don’t know what is.

We’re already in federal court over the IRS. We’ve issued a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and filed a lawsuit against the IRS to get to the bottom of this. We have to keep the pressure on because we already know what the IRS will do if it doubles its size – target Christians and conservatives.

We’ve already seen the IRS abuse its power by going after Christians and conservatives. ACLJ Director of Policy Harry Hutchison calls out the Left for targeting these groups:

So, essentially what the Democrats are proposing here in the so-called Build Back Better program is that they are trying to legitimize the targeting of virtually all Americans. That’s number one. Number two, they have placed Christian organizations in their crosshairs for selective mistreatment. And I think this particular case and the FOIA that we have filed illustrates that. But if you also look deeper into the bill, the bill also provides funds for a number of secular organizations and explicitly excludes religious organizations. That decision by the Democrats to place that particular provision in the bill is arguably contrary to the Supreme Court’s teaching in Trinity Lutheran. So, at the end of the day, what we are seeing is hostility towards working class Americans, hostility towards Christians and other religious groups. And at the end of the day, what do the Democrats want? They want to control each and every aspect of our lives.

If this bill is passed as is, that is what will happen. Thann Bennett described the path that this bill is on: 

Just this week . . . the House passed the rule to consider the bill in the House of Representatives. . . . A lot of the news is reporting that negotiations on this bill are taking place between President Biden and Senator Joe Manchin. But they have not been able to arrive on a package that can sort of pre-clear the Senate. So, Speaker Pelosi has taken a different strategy now. She is actually adding things back into this bill that Joe Manchin does not like. She’s doing that in order to get the votes of the progressives in her caucus. . . . She is aiming to take a vote on this bill . . . next week. Now, if she is able to get it through the House, that would send it back to the Senate where, again, the negotiations with Joe Manchin would become relevant.

Theoretically, if he reached a deal with the President and altered the bill in some way to get back to a size that he was comfortable with, they could pass it in the Senate and send it back to the House, which would be a take it or leave it vote. . . . People should not take this for granted. Because there are things being put into the bill as we speak. . . . Yes, there is a runway ahead, but it is moving closer to the finish line and we must remain vigilant.

The IRS has become politicized and is being used as a weapon to target individuals based on their political and religious affiliations. There is a reason why the IRS is the most feared agency by the American people. We’ve seen what they will do, and we won’t let them get away with it. We’ve defeated the IRS before, and we are prepared to do it again if necessary.

Today’s full Sekulow broadcast is complete with even more analysis of the massive spending bill in Congress that would double the size of the IRS. 

Watch the full broadcast below.

Finally, we’re in the middle of our Matching Challenge. Anything you give today will be doubled. Double your impact now, because we are going to take on an IRS that the Left wants to make twice as big.