'Fox to guard the chicken coop': Writer says Trump's IRS will be a 'grifter’s paradise'

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Internal Revenue Service would fit perfectly into his vision for the agency, according to an analysis.

And that could result in the IRS turning into a “grifter’s paradise,” according to the New Republic’s Timothy Noah, who wrote Friday that Trump’s nominee is also “plainly a guy who doesn’t think people should pay taxes.”

“Donald Trump is flooding the zone with so many terrible nominations that you may have missed that the president-elect recently picked former Rep. Billy Long of Missouri to be the next commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service,” Noah said. “Here’s another instance of choosing a fox to guard the chicken coop.”

Since leaving Congress in 2023 Long, an auctioneer and avid poker player, began working to drain the IRS from within the private sector, Noah told readers. He added that Long was “an anti-tax huckster who doesn’t think the IRS should exist,” and “makes his living promising to cut your tax bill 40 percent.”

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That’s partly because Long promoted the Employee Retention Tax Credit – a COVID-19-inspired tax credit signed by Trump – that’s been riddled with fraud, and partly because he spent his time in the House pushing to abolish the very agency he's been chosen to run, Noah wrote.

“Everybody qualifies,” Long said in a YouTube video last year, according to Noah’s report. Long continued in the video: “Funeral homes here in town…you think funeral homes didn’t have a lot of business during Covid? I mean, people that have had the best two years of their life ever on income qualify. And a lot of these CPAs are missing out on it.”

Noah concluded by noting Trump is looking to extend his 2017 tax cut for another decade.