$80 Billion for the IRS: Even Obama’s IRS Chief John Koskinen Says That is Too Much

Even Obama-era IRS chief John Koskinen, a longtime advocate of increasing the IRS budget, thinks $80 billion in new funding for the agency — the amount long sought by the Biden administration and in the current Senate Democrat reconciliation bill — is too much.

As reported by the New York Times in April 2021, Koskinen said this when asked about the $80 billion: “I’m not sure you’d be able to efficiently use that much money.” And, “That’s a lot of money.”

Here is the NYT article excerpt:

Still, John Koskinen, who served as I.R.S. commissioner under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump, said that he thought the $80 billion being proposed by the Biden administration might be too much. The suggestion was surprising coming from someone who lamented loudly that the agency was being starved when he was in charge.

“I’m not sure you’d be able to efficiently use that much money,” Mr. Koskinen said in an interview. “That’s a lot of money.” 

But yesterday the White House and Congressional Democrats touted a letter from Koskinen and former fellow IRS chiefs saying nice things about the reconciliation bill. Oddly enough there was no mention of Koskinen’s 2021 statement to the NYT. Perhaps with Biden’s inflation, $80 billion these days just doesn’t go as far as it did in 2021.

Rather than fix the agency’s longstanding mismanagement, ineptitude and abuse problems, the Democrats’ approach of throwing huge piles of money at the agency will make its problems worse.