'Huge mistake': Ex-IRS chiefs issue scathing takedown of Trump act in height of tax season

Seven former commissioners who oversaw the Internal Revenue Service under Democratic and Republican presidents spoke out against Donald Trump's firing thousands of that agency's workers during tax season.

The IRS is preparing to fire 6,700 employees beginning Thursday under Trump's newly created Department of Government Efficiency, and the former commissioners published an op-ed Monday morning in the New York Times criticizing the president's decision as counterproductive.

"That's a huge mistake," the headline stated.

"If you were to ask the top chief executives in the world to name the best strategy to attack waste in their organizations and balance the books, there is one answer you would be very, very unlikely to hear: Take an ax to accounts receivable, the part of an organization responsible for collecting revenue," read the op-ed, which was signed by Lawrence Gibbs, Fred T. Goldberg Jr., Charles Rossotti, Mark Everson, John Koskinen, Charles Rettig and Daniel Werfel.

The op-ed did not identify by name Trump's billionaire benefactor Elon Musk, who is leading the charge at DOGE although the White House has sought to obscure the exact nature of his unelected role in the administration. But the former commissioners chided the president's "private sector leaders" who encouraged him to lay off thousands of workers who are directly involved in collecting unpaid taxes.

"Every year, the government receives much less in taxes than it is owed," the former commissioners wrote. "Closing that gap, which stands at roughly $700 billion annually, would almost certainly require maintaining the IRS’s collection capacity. Depleting it is tantamount to a chief executive saying something like: 'We sold a lot of goods and services this year, but let’s limit our ability to collect what we’re owed.'"

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"Perhaps only the company’s competitors would approve of such an approach," they added. "Yet here we are."

The commissioners pointed out that shrinking the IRS would not reduce anyone's tax obligation, which can only be done through Congress, and would unfairly penalize Americans who meet their obligations while rewarding scofflaws.

"Aggressive reductions in the I.R.S.’s resources will only render our government less effective and less efficient in collecting the taxes Congress has imposed," they wrote. "It will shift the burden of funding the government from people who shirk their taxesto the honest people who pay them, and it will impede efforts by the I.R.S. to modernize customer service and simplify the tax filing process for everyone."

The commissioners pointed out that IRS employees were valuable members of their communities and mostly worked outside of Washington, D.C., and they knocked down conspiracy theories that 97 percent of them carried firearms on duty and pointed out that their worked helped fund the government.

"Our country needs a fully functioning tax system," they wrote.

"Nearly 200 million Americans are in the process of completing their tax returns," the commissioners added. "We urge caution in initiating major changes to I.R.S. operations during the filing season. But even after filing season ends, we believe — and we believe that successful chief executives across the country would concur — that making drastic cuts to accounts receivable as a way to improve cost efficiency just doesn’t add up."