The Internal Revenue Service is about to get slapped with a harsh payback for messing around with conservative groups, blowing wads of tax dollars on employee conferences and helping implement Obamacare.
The House Appropriations Committee is set to OK an IRS budget of $10.9 billion, $1.5 billion under President Obama‘s request for fiscal year 2015, reducing the agency’s budget to 2008 levels. A subcommittee vote is scheduled for Wednesday.
The goal is to keep the tax agency focused on its “core duties,” and eliminate efforts to judge the political activities of tax-exempt groups and brake its implementation of Obamacare.
The funding is part of a larger $21 billion bill for several agencies including the IRS, Treasury Department and Securities and Exchange Commission. Noting that it cuts $2.3 billion from the president’s overall request, Chairman Hal Rogers said, “the bill focuses cuts on lower-priority or poor-performing agencies, such as the scandal-plagued and inefficient Internal Revenue Service.”
The agency has always felt GOP fire, but the controversies over probing Tea Party and conservative groups, lavish spending on conventions and bonuses and a new push to re-evaluate the tax exempt status of political groups has the Republican-controlled House on the war path – one the Democratically-controlled Senate isn’t expected to follow when it takes up the same spending bill next week.
Below are the bill highlights about the IRS:
— A prohibition on funds for the IRS to target groups for regulatory scrutiny based on their ideological beliefs.
— A prohibition on funds for the IRS to target individuals for exercising their First Amendment rights.
— A prohibition on funding for the production of inappropriate videos and conferences.
— A prohibition on funding for the White House to order the IRS to determine the tax-exempt status of an organization.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
