The Internal Revenue Service will launch a full security review of its facilities nationwide, Commissioner Charles Rettig announced Tuesday, as congressional Republicans and far-right extremists are lashing out at the agency and the new funding it is slated to receive in a massive spending law.
In a letter to employees sent Tuesday, he wrote that the agency would conduct risk assessments for each of the IRS’s 600 facilities and evaluate whether to increase security patrols along building exteriors, boost designations for restricted areas, examine security around entrances and assess exterior lighting. It will be the agency’s first such review since the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 168 people.
“For me this is personal,” Rettig wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Post. “I’ll continue to make every effort to dispel any lingering misperceptions about our work. And I will continue to advocate for your safety in every venue where I have an audience. You go above and beyond every single day, and I am honored to work with each of you.”
The IRS is set to receive $80 billion in fresh funding over 10 years as part of President Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act. The money is designed to help the agency increase scrutiny of tax cheats and increase enforcement on high-income earners and major corporations, including a large hiring push to help the IRS make up for more than a decade of underfunding.
But Republicans have seized on the funding for the tax collector to attack the law, which also includes funding to address the climate crisis and lower health-care costs. GOP members of Congress have falsely claimed that many of the agency’s 87,000 new hires will be armed and that the new enforcement steps will be aimed at low- and middle-income taxpayers and small businesses.
Many Republicans have drawn baseless comparisons between the IRS’s new enforcement funding and the FBI’s search of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
“They have 80,000 employees. You know what the IRS also has? 4,600 guns. 5 million rounds of ammunition. Why? Democrats want to double its already massive size,” House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) said on the House floor this month, days after the FBI search.
“With this new power, the IRS will snoop around in your bank account, your Venmo, your small business. Then the government will shake you down for every last cent,” he added. “In light of [the FBI’s search of Trump’s residence], let me ask: Do you really trust this administration’s IRS to be fair, to not abuse their power?”
“Think about it: If the left will weaponize the FBI to raid President Trump’s personal residence, they will surely weaponize the IRS’s new 87,000 agents, many of whom will be trained in the use of deadly force, to go after any American citizen,” Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.) said this month on the House floor.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, wrote an open letter last week to job seekers discouraging them from applying to work at the IRS. His letter draws on a job posting for an IRS criminal investigator — a position that requires serving search warrants and making arrests — to suggest that all of the IRS’s new hires will “need to be ready to audit and investigate your fellow hardworking Americans, your neighbors and friends, you need to be ready and, to use the IRS’s words, willing, to kill them.”
In fact, of the IRS’s more than 78,000 employees, fewer than 3,000 work in criminal investigations and carry firearms.
“This is a shot at the reputation of the IRS employees and the IRS and our country,” Rettig said. “... That speech [about armed IRS agents] needs to be put into context about what might be accurate and what is absolutely false, and that seems to be missing in the dialogue that’s out there. This country would not function without a functioning Internal Revenue Service.”
Employees told The Post that the right-wing rhetoric has raised fears that workers could be targeted at their workplaces or in public if they’re identified as IRS employees.
David Carrone, president of the Louisiana-Arkansas National Treasury Employees Union chapter, has tried to allay colleagues’ concerns in recent days and persuade them not to leave the agency.
“This terrifies me. This is the reason that I don’t tell people that I work for the IRS,” one employee wrote to him in an email this week, which Carrone read to The Post.
Lorie McCann, president of the Chicago-area chapter, has reminded union members not to wear their work ID badges outside the office so as not to attract undue attention. Some colleagues who work in private buildings leased by the IRS have asked about security enhancements at their workplace. Others who work in federal buildings have told her they worry that their facility could be targeted by domestic terrorists, she said.
“The fact that employees are afraid — I’m afraid — that’s sad,” said McCann, who has worked at the agency for 31 years.
NTEU President Tony Reardon wrote to Rettig on Saturday asking the commissioner to initiate a security review.
“Employees are really concerned that all of this negative rhetoric and this climate that has developed as a result of it may lead to actual threats to employees,” Reardon told The Post.
IRS workers say they are chastened by years of threats and harassment toward federal employees, and specifically those with the tax agency, long an enemy of right-wing extremist groups. The agency experienced sporadic but sustained violent attacks between the 1970s and 1990s, when extremist groups targeted the IRS to express broader anti-government sentiments, experts say.
In 2010, a Texas man flew a small airplane into an IRS building in Austin, killing one agency employee and injuring 13 others, after espousing specifically anti-tax conspiracy theories. Earlier this month, a gunman tried to breach an FBI office in Cincinnati days after the bureau searched Trump’s home.
That further raised safety concerns, IRS employees said.
“You have to look at the broader context where it’s not just this issue about the raise in the IRS budget, but it’s about this moment where our governmental institutions are being attacked verbally and otherwise, left and right, right now. The IRS gets incorporated into that,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
Memes and other messages circulating on social media have drawn on GOP talking points about the IRS to call for violence toward federal employees, Pitcavage and other experts told The Post.
A channel sponsored by the far-right extremist group Proud Boys on the social media platform Telegram repeated the falsehood that new IRS hires had to be “willing to use deadly force.” Other online memes likened IRS employees to Nazi SS officers and suggested taxpayers should stage a “tea party” and tar and feather tax collectors.
A Republican candidate for the Florida legislature called for residents to “shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other feds on sight.”
“Our democracy is in crisis,” said Lindsay Schubiner, who studies anti-government movements at the Western States Center think tank. “And we’re seeing every week the impact of rising political violence that’s directly tied to the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and white nationalist ideology.”
Drew Harwell contributed to this report.
