My friends cheer every cut to the IRS budget. They cheer because they cheat. Not on a grand scale. A little consulting income that never meets a 1099. A boat that becomes a business expense. A home office occupying most of the house on paper and none of it in life. Ordinary theft by comfortable men who resent paying for the roads they drive on.
They are not the super-rich. They are dentists and contractors and small landlords, men with two trucks and a place on the water. They believe, with the confidence of the badly informed, that a starved IRS will leave them alone.
It will do the opposite.
Congress and the press grade the agency on the number of returns it examines. Count matters. Auditing a very wealthy individual, who has 40 partnerships stacked like nesting dolls and a law firm on retainer, takes years and requires a dedicated team. An audit of my friend's finances takes one agent a few days to complete. Cut the budget, and the agency does what any outfit does when the money runs out. It stops buying the expensive item and buys the cheap one.
You are the cheap one.
The consulting check that never met a 1099 has a paper twin. Someone filed the form, a computer matched it against the return, and a notice printed itself for the price of a stamp. That machinery survives any budget. It needs no agent, no travel, no training, and no supervisor to sign off. The 40 partnerships have no twin. Untangling them takes a revenue agent who understands passthrough structures, and the agency lost more than 3,600 of those people by the middle of 2025, close to a third of everyone qualified to do the work. Nobody replaced them. The complicated theft remains unexamined because the man who was responsible for investigating it accepted the buyout. The simple theft goes to a machine.
The agent who stayed runs the same calculation. Since the reform act of 1998, the agency cannot judge him on the money he brings in. It judges him on how efficiently he opens and closes cases. Give a man that yardstick, take away half his colleagues, and he will choose the file he can finish. He is not corrupt. He is employed. He will pick my friend's Schedule C over a hedge fund every time, and by the only measure his supervisor is permitted to use, he will be right.
My friends have an answer to this, and it is a decent one. Audit rates fell for everybody. Fewer agents means fewer letters, and the odds against any particular return are longer now than at any point in living memory. All true, and all beside the point. The question was never whether enforcement shrinks. The question is which enforcement survives the shrinking. What dies is the audit that needs a human being. What lives is the audit that needs a stamp. My friends are betting on a smaller haystack. The machine does not search haystacks. It matches numbers, and their numbers do not match.
The record is not ambiguous. Filers earning $1 million or more faced audits at 7.2 percent in 2011, and at 1.6 percent by 2018. Families claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit, the poorest working people in the country, drew audits in 2019 at more than four times the rate of filers earning between $25,000 and $500,000, because those audits run by mail and cost almost nothing. The agency now fields fewer revenue agents than at any point since 1953, when the economy was a seventh of its present size. The 2026 appropriation cut another $1.1 billion, the deepest cut to the base budget ever passed, and clawed back most of the money set aside to rebuild. Staffing fell from about 102,000 to 74,000 in a single year. The 2027 request slices enforcement 18 percent deeper. Every number points one direction. The hard cases get abandoned. The easy cases get worked. My friends are the easy cases.
None of this touches me. My books lie open. I make mistakes, and honest mistakes cost money and nothing more. No cash sits in my safe. At worst the government sends a bill for back taxes, interest, and penalties, and I write the check and grind my teeth. Cheats get a different ending. A substantial omission holds the file open for six years. Fraud holds it open forever, the interest compounding quietly the whole time.
I know what the boat looks like. It rides at a dock 40 feet from a kitchen window, and it earned its business classification on one afternoon three years ago when two men who might someday have become clients drank beer on the stern. The home office is a corner of a bedroom holding a desk nobody sits at and a cabinet nobody opens, and on paper it eats a third of the house, which means a third of the mortgage interest, the insurance, the roof, and the power. The consulting money arrives as personal checks from men who pay cash for everything and file nothing. Not one of them would lift a wallet off a bar. All of them are quietly certain that what they keep is theirs by a natural right the rest of us are too dull to claim. Every one of them voted for the men who wrote the appropriation.
They did not starve the government. They automated it. The part of the state that thinks, that asks a second question, that follows a paper trail into the basement of a law firm, is the expensive part, and Congress defunded it deliberately, knowing exactly which audits would die and which would survive. What remains is cheap, tireless, and pointed downward. The men who wrote that appropriation understood the trade they were making. Their donors have 40 partnerships. My friends have a Schedule C and a boat.
My Trumper friends will cheer the next cut too. The knife was sharpened for them, and they call it a gift.
The letter will come. It will feel like persecution. It will be arithmetic.
Related at Burnt Ground
Forty Trillion Dollars and Nobody Did It. The debt is only an emergency when the other guy is holding the pen.
The Road to Serfdom. You go where you look. My friends are looking at the taxman.
Who Got the Money. Follow the appropriation to the men who wrote it.
Books
We Used to Be Wise. Nineteen chapters on the fifty-year capture that produced the appropriation.
The Art of the Lie. Trump did not corrupt the system. He revealed it.
The full catalog: Arrakis Publishing
Further Reading
A Weakened IRS Has Substantial Consequences (The Budget Lab at Yale)
Three Strikes Against Filers This Tax Season (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)
How the IRS Was Gutted (ProPublica)