In Shocker, Republicans Cut IRS Budget Yet Again

Hooray! Everybody is getting more money in the 2018 spending bill. Well, almost everybody:

This comes from Emily Horton of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, who says this:

Policymakers need to recognize the depth of the IRS’s budget and workforce depletion, as well as the multi-year and multi-dimensional nature of the response required to successfully implement and enforce the new tax law. Rather than continue squeezing the agency’s funding, policymakers should give the IRS sufficient resources to perform its core functions of collecting revenues and enforcing the nation’s tax laws.

Unfortunately, our current policymakers do recognize the depth of the IRS’s workforce depletion. In fact, cutting their budget is designed to deplete their workforce. Why? Because our current policymakers are Republicans, and Republicans don’t want the IRS to perform its core function of enforcing the nation’s tax laws. After all, that would mean more audits of rich people, and that’s not something they want.

This is neither new nor a secret. Republicans have conducted a jihad against the IRS for decades, primarily because they don’t want their rich donors to be pestered with audits. It’s the next best thing to just cutting their taxes outright.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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