AMAC Exclusive – By Katie Sullivan
Many Americans are by now aware of the Biden administration’s plan to hire some 87,000 new IRS agents with $80 billion set aside for that purpose as part of Democrats’ misleadingly titled Inflation Reduction Act. But even more terrifying than this army of new “tax enforcers” prying into the finances of millions of ordinary Americans is the fact that, under the Biden administration’s “equity” agenda, all of them will be trained in the tenets of wokeism and ordered to advance Democrats’ far-left social agenda.
On day one of his administration, Joe Biden signed an Executive Order on “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” Specifically, the Order directed every federal agency to develop and implement an “ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda that matches the scale of the opportunities and challenges that we face.” Notably, Biden included the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy in the “Equitable Data Working Group” that the Order established.
This move immediately raised the alarm for conservatives, who had by then become all-too familiar with the left-wing concept of “equity.” While the term sounds similar to “equality,” it in fact refers to the exact opposite approach – using government power to dispense unequal treatment among different groups in an attempt to force “equal” outcomes for all. As Vice President Kamala Harris explained in a tweet in November 2020, “equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.”
The Treasury Department – which oversees the IRS – released its “Equity Action Plan” in accordance with Biden’s Executive Order in October 2021 to little fanfare. But contained within the document are hints at a scheme to radicalize the IRS in accordance with left-wing identity politics – a plan that the agency will soon have the manpower to implement.
Treasury’s Equity Action Plan makes several references to “taxation equity,” calling for a full-scale “detailed analysis” of what equity in tax policy would look like. Just as the federal government considers “equity” when distributing grants, taking into account whether or not an applicant is part of an “underserved community,” it is not difficult to imagine that the IRS may aim to do something similar with tax policy.
In other words, the IRS may soon move to codify a person’s race, gender, or sexual orientation as a determining factor in tax collection or enforcement actions. For those who remember the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups under the Obama administration, such a development likely doesn’t seem so far-fetched, as terrifying as it may be.
One alarming sign that such an effort is already underway are recent moves by the IRS to obtain taxpayer data regarding race, ethnicity, and sex. The Tax Code does not now and has not ever allowed the IRS to collect this data from other federal agencies – but in the name of equity, that may no longer be the case.
Treasury’s Equity Action Plan specifically states that “The imputed data [on taxpayer race and sex] will also allow [the Office of Tax Policy] to evaluate the equity implications of any tax policy proposal considered by the Administration. Other analyses will include assessments of statistical models used to identify potentially non-compliant tax returns for enforcement purposes to ensure the models are not subject to algorithmic bias.” This an astounding statement from the Biden administration – effectively admitting that tax policies will be designed to favor certain racial groups over others and that audits will be conducted not according to mathematical formulas that the agency has supposedly used for decades, but according to enforcing “equity.”
Some left-wing groups that have the ear of the Biden administration have already laid out what this new “equitable” tax regime might look like. For instance, Arnold Ventures Group – a notorious liberal dark money organization – has published a report bemoaning the difficulty illegal migrants have in filing taxes because they don’t have a social security number, further arguing that illegal immigrants should not even be subjected to taxes if they are not eligible for social security. In 2016, the Black Lives Matter organization released its tax plan, which called for “a full scale overhaul on tax policy that increases equity, and is particularly sensitive to racial equity.”
With a gigantic influx of new employees, the IRS will be more than capable of putting such schemes into action. Like every other federal employee, all 87,000 new agents will be subjected to so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) training, the left’s terminology for its indoctrination workshops. Part of the IRS’s DEI training includes a two-hour course in “understanding bias in data” – asserting that even hard empirical data is infected by “systemic racism” if it reflects unfavorably on “underserved communities.”
Since day one, the Biden administration has “gone for woke” in the day-to-day operations of every executive agency of the federal government. Buts its budding efforts to turn the IRS into an enforcement tool for the far-left’s social agenda may just be the most destructive such effort to date.
Katharine “Katie” Sullivan was as an Acting Assistant Attorney General and a senior advisor to the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Trump. She previously served 11 years as a state trial court judge in Colorado.