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The Fiscal State Under Siege: Why People Hate the IRS, and Why You Should Care
https://www.crisesnotes.com/the-fiscal-state-under-siege-why-people-hate-the-irs-and-why-you-should-care/How Trump, DOGE, and Project 2025 Are Turning the IRS Into a Tool of Authoritarian Rule
Editor’s Introduction: Hello readers, it's Nathan Tankus and I am very happy to bring to you the first in a long multi-part series on the IRS spearheaded by Anisha Steephen. Anisha worked for the United States Treasury from 2021 through January 2025. They concluded their tenure around the time Fiscal Assistant Secretary David Lebryk was pushed out of government. Because of their specialization in economic and tax issues, they were the perfect person to take on investigating what has been going on in the Internal Revenue Service and providing the big picture understanding Notes on the Crises readers need about what’s going on.
Anisha Steephen (they/them) is a nationally recognized expert in domestic economic policy and mission-driven investing, with over 15 years of experience advancing public policies that address structural inequality. Anisha served as the first Senior Policy Advisor for Racial Equity at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Anisha can be found on bluesky @asteephen.bsky.social. If you are a current or former IRS employee with knowledge of DOGE’s data access details and role of contractors such as Palantir please reach out to Anisha on signal at their username as2795.01
Project 2025 and the Structural Takeover
If you’ve read Project 2025, you know there was a plan. The authors laid out a blueprint to bring the IRS under greater executive control by infiltrating political appointees, gutting the civil service, and pushing an ambitious slate of regressive tax policies through Congress.
Well, it’s happening.
The first public signal of chaos at the IRS came on February 17 when the Associated Press reported that DOGE was seeking access to the IRS’s Integrated Data Retrieval System—one of the most sensitive (I would argue the most sensitive) databases of personal information in the federal government. Privacy experts and lawmakers immediately sounded the alarm that this was no ordinary tech integration. It was a structural takeover.
Since then, the chaos has only multiplied to include leadership purges, workforce cuts, and a DOGE-hosted IRS “hackathon.” These aren’t isolated incidents. They reflect a strategic campaign to transform the IRS into a politically partisan enforcement mechanism and a lever of executive power.
This goes far beyond just administrative disorder that is expected with any administration change, which would be concerning enough on its own. This is a systematic takeover of the federal government’s fiscal core. What’s at stake is not only the architecture of how the state sees, collects, and allocates public resources, but whether a functioning democracy can survive without it.
Why the IRS Matters
The IRS sits at the center of the federal government’s fiscal architecture. As the financial nexus between the state and its residents, it facilitates the movement of trillions of dollars through the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. It enforces tax law, detects fraud, and has the authority to audit the ultra-wealthy to crack down on tax evasion that enables them to become even richer. The IRS does not write tax law, but enforces the code passed by Congress. Confusing the IRS with the architects of tax policy lets lawmakers off the hook. Its role is administrative, not factional, and that’s precisely what makes it so powerful.
But its role goes deeper. The IRS is not merely a tool of extraction: it can be a mechanism for redistribution, stabilization, and democratic investment. In Fiscal Year 2024, the IRS collected $4.9 trillion in taxes, which comprised 96% of total government revenue and was equivalent to 17% of GDP that year. When governed with public purpose, the IRS powers the fiscal machinery that sustains democracy itself by facilitating the spending that funds housing, healthcare, climate action, education, and income support that reaches millions. For example, In 2021 the IRS delivered over $100 billion in expanded Child Tax Credit payments.
If you’ve read Project 2025, you know there was a plan. The authors laid out a blueprint to bring the IRS under greater executive control by infiltrating political appointees, gutting the civil service, and pushing an ambitious slate of regressive tax policies through Congress.
Well, it’s happening.
The first public signal of chaos at the IRS came on February 17 when the Associated Press reported that DOGE was seeking access to the IRS’s Integrated Data Retrieval System—one of the most sensitive (I would argue the most sensitive) databases of personal information in the federal government. Privacy experts and lawmakers immediately sounded the alarm that this was no ordinary tech integration. It was a structural takeover.
Since then, the chaos has only multiplied to include leadership purges, workforce cuts, and a DOGE-hosted IRS “hackathon.” These aren’t isolated incidents. They reflect a strategic campaign to transform the IRS into a politically partisan enforcement mechanism and a lever of executive power.
This goes far beyond just administrative disorder that is expected with any administration change, which would be concerning enough on its own. This is a systematic takeover of the federal government’s fiscal core. What’s at stake is not only the architecture of how the state sees, collects, and allocates public resources, but whether a functioning democracy can survive without it.
Why the IRS Matters
The IRS sits at the center of the federal government’s fiscal architecture. As the financial nexus between the state and its residents, it facilitates the movement of trillions of dollars through the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. It enforces tax law, detects fraud, and has the authority to audit the ultra-wealthy to crack down on tax evasion that enables them to become even richer. The IRS does not write tax law, but enforces the code passed by Congress. Confusing the IRS with the architects of tax policy lets lawmakers off the hook. Its role is administrative, not factional, and that’s precisely what makes it so powerful.
But its role goes deeper. The IRS is not merely a tool of extraction: it can be a mechanism for redistribution, stabilization, and democratic investment. In Fiscal Year 2024, the IRS collected $4.9 trillion in taxes, which comprised 96% of total government revenue and was equivalent to 17% of GDP that year. When governed with public purpose, the IRS powers the fiscal machinery that sustains democracy itself by facilitating the spending that funds housing, healthcare, climate action, education, and income support that reaches millions. For example, In 2021 the IRS delivered over $100 billion in expanded Child Tax Credit payments.
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