Earlier this year, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that President Donald Trump had a new strategy for funding the federal government: an External Revenue Service. “[The President’s] plan is very simple: to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay,” he told Fox News in February.

The “outsiders,” according to Lutnick, were foreign nations, which he claimed would effectively fund the government through the tariffs they paid. This, went the tale, would make the Internal Revenue Service irrelevant.