In his first term, Donald Trump had a knack for choosing officials to lead agencies that the officials didn’t think should exist. Rick Perry, for example, called for the elimination of the Department of Energy, but that didn’t stop Trump from nominating Perry to lead the Department of Energy. Mick Mulvaney called for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before Trump chose him to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The list, unfortunately, doesn’t stop there.
As the president-elect prepares to return to the White House, a similar list is starting to take shape. The Republican has, for example, announced plans to nominate a GOP operative named Kash Patel to lead the FBI, despite — or perhaps because of — the fact that Patel vowed to “shut down” the bureau’s headquarters and “reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state.’”
Similarly, Trump has tapped former Republican Rep. Billy Long of Missouri to lead the Internal Revenue Service, which might not be especially notable were it not for the fact that the former congressman repeatedly tried to abolish the Internal Revenue Service. The New Republic’s Tim Noah described it as a timely example of “choosing a fox to guard the chicken coop.”
When Long was in Congress, he co-sponsored, in three consecutive sessions, a bill to abolish the IRS and replace the income tax, the payroll tax, the estate tax, and the gift tax with a 30 percent sales tax. This is a crackpot proposal that’s been kicking around since 1993.
Before we dig in on this, it’s important to pause and note that the Republican president-elect shouldn’t be choosing anyone to lead the IRS. The incumbent commissioner, Danny Werfel, was appointed in 2022 to a five-year term, and by all accounts, he wants to keep his position — traditionally a “relatively nonpartisan management job“ — until his term ends.
Trump evidently intends to fire him nevertheless — an unprecedented move and evidence of a president-elect who’s determined to consolidate power after running on an authoritarian-style platform.
John Koskinen, a former IRS commissioner, expressed concern this week that Trump and his team would turn the office “into a political position.” By all appearances, that’s precisely what the incoming Republican has in mind.
Complicating matters, The New York Times reported after Trump’s announcement that Long has a problematic record of peddling a pandemic-era tax credit that the IRS has warned “is a magnet for fraud.”
But as the former Missouri congressman prepares for Senate confirmation scrutiny, the most basic of questions hangs overhead: Why should Long lead a critically important federal agency that he doesn’t believe should exist?
