House Budget Committee member Chip Roy (R-Texas) reiterated calls to repeal the roughly $80 billion in funding in a memo sent to colleagues on Wednesday.
“Recouping these funds will not only save billions in inflationary spending right now, it also reduces the size of a weaponized agency and protects hardworking American families and businesses,” Roy wrote to fellow Republicans in the memo.
But estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) project that the IRS funding would lead to $180.4 billion in additional revenue for the U.S. government over the next decade.
And new research suggests the additional IRS funding may be even more effective at reducing the national deficit than previously thought.
House Republicans sought to cancel the funding boost in their partisan plan to raise the debt ceiling last month.
The bill includes language to nix $45 billion for audits and $25 billion for operations, while preserving allotments of $3 billion for taxpayer services and $4.75 billion for a technology update.
The House-passed bill also cancels the funding for a formal study of an IRS-run online tax filing system, which the IRS has already completed and used to build a prototype that will be piloted during the 2024 tax filing system.
Tax experts say the $45 billion for enforcement will go the furthest toward reducing the national deficit, which now stands at $31.4 trillion.
That’s about 120 percent of what the U.S. economy actually produces in a year, as measured by the ratio between debt and gross domestic product (GDP).
The Hill’s Tobias Burns takes it from here.
