Jason Smith: Debt Ceiling Deal Targets IRS ‘Enforcement’

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) said Monday the debt ceiling deal goes after IRS enforcement by cutting agency funding.

Congress released the legislative text for the debt ceiling deal struck between McCarthy and President Joe Biden, formally known as the Fiscal Responsibility Act. The House will tentatively vote on the legislation on Wednesday.

Among the bill’s major spending reforms and caps, the bill will rescind $1.4 billion of the IRS’s unobligated funding from the Inflation Reduction Act’s increase in funding for the agency. The compromise struck between McCarthy and Biden for future appropriations bills would also reduce IRS funding in fiscal year 2024 by $10 billion and fiscal year 2025 by $10 billion.

This would represent a significant dent in the IRS’s increased funding created thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. It remains uncertain but White House officials suggested this past week that they may pull money forward from later years in the Inflation Reduction Act funding.

The Inflation Reduction Act funded the IRS with $80 billion to hire 87,000 additional agents to find more revenue to offset the costs of the climate change programs and other leftist carveouts in the legislation.

“It takes a bite out of the massive pay raise that Democrats gave the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act, going after enforcement in particular,” Smith said during a press conference call on Monday.

Defunding the additional IRS agents was a key plank of the House Republican “Commitment to America” agenda they unveiled ahead of the 2022 midterms.

Reports suggest a preliminary analysis of the Fiscal Responsibility Act would cut spending by over two trillion dollars.

Smith and Republicans have long contended that the bill would largely target the middle class.

The Missouri conservative, in an interview with Breitbart News, noted the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said that the increased IRS funding would largely target working-class Americans.

The CBO report states the “IRS audits will take at least $20 billion from working and middle-class Americans earning less than $400,000 a year, which is in addition to the billions already taken from this income group.”

Notably, Senate Democrats shot down an amendment sponsored by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) to the Inflation Reduction Act that would have barred the IRS from targeting working-class Americans with the IRS’s increased funding.