Weaponizing the IRS: Project 2025's Anti-Enforcement Agenda Is Already Being Executed
Project 2025's Treasury chapter aims to hollow out the IRS by freezing its budget, blocking information reporting, and politicizing career staff — but several of these cuts have already been enacted, including an $80 billion IRA clawback and cancellation of the Direct File pilot, while the IRS workforce has been slashed by 30,000 since 2025.
Project 2025 frames the IRS as a rogue bureaucracy that must be starved and politicized. The Heritage Foundation blueprint calls for freezing the IRS budget in real terms, ending the $80 billion Inflation Reduction Act expansion, blocking a comprehensive financial-account reporting regime, and converting career deputy commissioners into presidential appointees. The stated rationale is taxpayer protection; the actual effect is to choke the agency's ability to audit the wealthy and corporations while leaving wage earners subject to the same automated liens and garnishments.
What the source text does not say is that key pieces of this plan have already moved from paper to policy. As of early 2026, Congress has clawed back roughly $20 billion of the IRA enforcement funding (CBPP, April 2026), the IRS Direct File pilot has been cancelled, and the IRS workforce has shrunk by about 30,000 employees through attrition and buyouts. These are concrete steps toward Project 2025's goal of a neutered tax administrator. At the same time, the push to make senior career posts political appointees remains pending — a move that would inject partisan loyalty into technical enforcement decisions.
The distributive consequence is stark: when the IRS cannot audit the top 1%, the tax gap widens, and working families pay the price through eroded public services and an uneven playing field. An alternative path would restore IRA enforcement funding, expand the Direct File system to cut compliance costs for low-income filers, and reject politicization of career staff — while protecting taxpayer rights through genuine independent oversight, not budget starvation.
The humanitarian alternative
The alternative is a well-funded, depoliticized IRS that can collect what is owed under existing law. Congress should (1) fully appropriate the remaining Inflation Reduction Act enforcement funding, (2) pass the Tax Compliance and Public Investment Act to close the pass-through loophole and fund automatic tax filing, (3) reject the OECD withdrawal proposal and instead join the global transparency framework to close offshore evasion, and (4) codify the independence of the Office of Taxpayer Advocate with guaranteed budget floor and removal protections.
Rollback path — how this gets undone
This action has already been implemented. These are the concrete levers that could reverse it.
- Restore IRS workforce to post-IRA baseline Congress must include in the next appropriations bill a directive to rehire all staff terminated after January 2025 and a prohibition on further reductions below the 2024 staffing level unless specifically authorized.
- Repeal EO 14170's regulatory freeze as it applies to IRS rulemaking The Treasury Secretary should rescind the IRS-specific guidance implementing EO 14170 that blocked all pending enforcement regulations, restoring the ability to issue rules on corporate tax shelters and digital asset reporting.
- Rescind Schedule F for IRS career positions The Office of Personnel Management must reclassify all IRS positions that were moved to Schedule F in 2025 back to competitive service, ensuring nonpolitical hiring and firing standards.
- Restore the Office of Taxpayer Advocate independence and funding Congress must pass standalone legislation mandating a minimum 2% of IRS budget for the Taxpayer Advocate, with direct reporting to Congress and removal only for cause, to undo the 2025 budget cut and restructuring that eliminated the office's independent investigation unit.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 24: Federal Reserve (pp 732-734)"— 699 — Department of the Treasury Doubling the IRS? The Inflation Reduction Act contains a radical $80 billion expansion of the IRS—enough to double the size of its workforce.34 Unless Congress reverses this policy, the IRS will become much more intrusive and impose still greater costs on the American people. The Biden Administration has also sought to make the tax system’s adminis - trative burden much worse in other ways. For example, it has proposed creating a comprehensive financial account information reporting regime that would apply to all business and personal accounts with more than $600. Banks would be required to collect the taxpayer identification numbers of and file a revised Form 1099-K for all affected payees, as well as provide additional information. 35 This massive increase in the scope and breadth of information reporting should be unequivo - cally opposed. Management. The IRS has approximately 81,000 employees.36 Of those, only two are presidential appointments—the Commissioner and the Chief Counsel. 37 As a practical matter, it is impossible for these two officials to overcome bureau - cratic inertia and to implement policy changes that the IRS bur…"