It’s become a reflex on the right: the IRS is bloated, intrusive, and growing. Cut its budget. Cut its staff. Cut its enforcement. The framing polls well. It also gets the underlying economics exactly backwards. When you defund the agency that collects the revenue funding everything else, you don’t get small government — you get a more selective, more regressive version of the same government, paid for by the people who can’t afford accountants.
The audit gap is a class issue
Decades of IRS budget cuts produced a striking outcome: audit rates on millionaires collapsed while audits of low-income taxpayers held steady or climbed in relative terms. Wealthy filers have complex returns, partnerships, foreign holdings, and aggressive deductions. Auditing them takes specialized staff, time, and litigation budget. Auditing an Earned Income Tax Credit recipient is fast and cheap because the agency does it by mail. As enforcement budgets shrank, auditors followed the path of least resistance. By 2019, a household earning under $25,000 was roughly as likely to be audited as one earning over $1 million. Restoring funding flips that ratio back. It’s not a partisan claim — it’s a workforce capacity claim documented by Treasury and the GAO.
Every dollar returns more than a dollar
Independent estimates from the Treasury, CBO, and academic researchers consistently show that marginal IRS enforcement spending returns somewhere between five and twelve dollars per dollar invested, depending on which programs are funded. High-end audits, partnership reviews, and offshore compliance pay back even more. This isn’t speculative — it’s the kind of return profile that, in any other context, would prompt immediate investment. Cutting the IRS budget to “save money” is the rare policy move that actively widens the deficit. Conservatives who claim to care about fiscal discipline should be the loudest advocates for adequate enforcement funding, because uncollected taxes are functionally identical to spending without offsets. The current right-of-center position is structurally incoherent on its own terms.
The honest case against
There’s a legitimate libertarian argument that taxes themselves should be lower and the agency smaller as a consequence. That’s a coherent position — it just isn’t the argument that gets made. The mainstream conservative case treats IRS staffing as the villain rather than the tax code’s complexity, which is what makes enforcement expensive in the first place. Simplifying the code would let a smaller IRS work effectively. Cutting staff without simplifying the code just guarantees that complex returns go unexamined while simple returns get scrutinized. That’s the worst of both worlds: less revenue, more hassle for ordinary filers, and a quiet windfall for high-end tax avoidance.
The bottom line
Funding the IRS isn’t about empowering bureaucrats. It’s about who actually pays the taxes already on the books. A well-staffed agency audits sophisticated taxpayers, collects what’s owed, and reduces the burden on honest filers. A defunded agency squeezes the easy targets and lets the hard ones walk. If you believe in fairness or fiscal responsibility, the math points one direction.
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