A majority of Americans support Republicans' efforts to block the Biden administration from hiring 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service employees, according to a new poll.
Sixty percent of voters want Congress to reverse the hiring, which Democrats funded last year with $80 billion in spending through the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, polling conducted by the Convention of States/Trafalgar Group found. In their first act in the majority, House Republicans last week voted to rescind nearly $71 billion in funding for the IRS expansion, which would more than double the size of the agency and make it larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.
While 84 percent of Republicans oppose the expansion, according to the poll, more than a quarter of Democratic voters also oppose the hiring spree.
While the White House defended the IRS overhaul, saying the agency would target the ultra-wealthy, the Biden administration is expected to target small businesses and freelancers in an effort to bring in more than $200 billion in revenue. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that 78 to 90 percent of new revenue from the hirings would come from families making less than $200,000 per year.
Poor Americans faced a far greater chance of being audited by the IRS in 2022 than other income groups, the Washington Free Beacon reported:
In fact, no group faced as much scrutiny from the IRS as those who made below $25,000, the university's data-gathering center found. Among families that benefited from the earned income tax credit, a rebate on income and payroll taxes made available to the nation's poorest families, 1.27 percent were audited. The IRS in 2022 audited just 0.19 percent of the vast majority of taxpayers, meaning the poorest families were at least 550 percent more likely to have the IRS knock on their door than the average filer.
The Democratic-controlled Senate is expected to kill the House Republicans' bill to defund the IRS.
Update Jan. 20 1:05 p.m.: This article was updated to include the fact that the poll was conducted by the Convention of States/Trafalgar Group.