Under Trump, the IRS’ audit revenue falls in predictable and damaging ways

Donald Trump’s second term has been a difficult one for the IRS. The tax agency has struggled with resignations, DOGE-imposed disruptions and the abandonment of a much-needed modernization initiative.

Complicating matters, there’s been a revolving door at the IRS administrator’s office. In the first seven months of Trump’s second term, seven different people led the agency. The eighth was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who already had another important full-time job. Since March, no one has served as IRS commissioner, although the White House tapped Frank Bisignano to serve as the agency’s chief executive officer (an office that’s never existed before), despite the fact that he also has a full-time job running the Social Security Administration.

With all of this tumult, it’s tempting to ask how the IRS can be expected to fulfill its core functions. The answer to that question is that it’s not completing some of its core functions. The New York Times reported:

The amount of money the Internal Revenue Service collected from audits dropped dramatically last year after the Trump administration pushed out many of the agency’s employees, according to a watchdog report released on Monday.

The report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, called TIGTA, showed that I.R.S. audits brought in $6.5 billion in fiscal year 2025, a 35 percent decrease from the $10 billion that audits elicited the previous year.

This isn’t altogether surprising. On the contrary, it was effectively inevitable: The president slashed the IRS workforce, and nearly a third of its staff dedicated to audits is now gone.

During Joe Biden’s presidency, Democratic officials advanced a straightforward proposition: When it comes to domestic priorities such as investments in infrastructure, it’s not entirely necessary to raise taxes, they said. As an alternative, the IRS can simply better enforce the tax laws that already exist to ensure that people are paying their fair share, which would mean more revenue to be invested on behalf of the public.

Trump and his party have not only rejected that approach — they’ve taken steps to ensure the opposite outcome.

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