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The Internal Revenue Service will launch a comprehensive security review of its facilities across the country, Commissioner Charles Rettig announced Tuesday, as congressional Republicans and far-right extremists attack the agency and the new funding it is slated to receive in a massive spending bill.
“We see what’s out there in terms of social networks. Our workforce is concerned about their safety,” Rettig told The Washington Post in an interview. “The comments being made are extremely disrespectful to the agency, the employees and the country.”
In a letter to employees sent Tuesday, he wrote that the agency will conduct risk assessments for each of the IRS’s 600 facilities and evaluate whether to increase security patrols outside buildings, increase designations for restricted areas, examine security around entrances and assess exterior lighting. It will be the agency’s first such review since the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people.
“For me this is personal,” Rettig wrote in the letter, obtained by The Post. “I will continue to make every effort to dispel any lingering misperceptions about our work. And I will continue to advocate for your safety wherever I am in public. You go above and beyond every day, and I am honored to work with each of you.”
The IRS will receive $80 billion in new funding over 10 years as part of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The money is designed to help the agency increase scrutiny of tax cheats and increase enforcement of regulations on high-income earners and large corporations, including a major hiring push to help the IRS compensate more d ‘a decade of underfunding.
But Republicans have seized funding for the tax collector to attack the law, which also includes funding to address the climate crisis and lower health care costs. GOP members of Congress have falsely claimed that many of the agency’s 87,000 new hires will be armed and that the new enforcement steps will target low- and middle-income taxpayers and small businesses.
Many Republicans have drawn baseless comparisons between the new IRS funding and the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
“They have 80,000 employees. You know what the IRS also has? 4,600 guns. 5 million rounds of ammunition. Because? Democrats want to double their already massive size,” House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) said on the floor this month, days after the FBI search.
“With this new power, the IRS will raid your bank account, your Venmo, your small business. Then the government will shake you down for every penny,” he added. “In light of [the FBI’s search of Trump’s residence]let me ask: do you really trust this administration’s IRS to be fair, not to abuse its power?
“Think about it: If the left arms the FBI to raid President Trump’s personal residence, it will surely arm the new 87,000 IRS agents, many of whom will be trained in the use of lethal force, to go after anyone American citizen”. Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.) said on the House floor this month.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), chairman of the Republican National Senate Committee, wrote an open letter last week to job seekers to discourage them from applying for jobs at the IRS. His letter draws on a job posting for an IRS criminal investigator, a position that requires serving search warrants and making arrests, to suggest that all new IRS hires “will need to be prepared to audit and investigate your fellow working Americans, your neighbors and friends, you must be prepared and, to use the words of the IRS, willingto kill them.”
In fact, of the more than 78,000 IRS employees, fewer than 3,000 work in criminal investigations and carry firearms.
“This is a testament to the reputation of IRS employees and the IRS and our country,” Rettig said. “… That speech [about armed IRS agents] it needs to be put into context about what might be accurate and what is absolutely false, and that seems to be missing from the dialogue out there. This country would not function without a functioning Internal Revenue Service.”
Employees told The Post that the right-wing rhetoric has raised fears that workers could be targeted at their workplaces or in public if they identify themselves as IRS employees.
David Carrone, president of the Louisiana-Arkansas chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union, has tried to assuage his colleagues’ concerns in recent days and persuade them not to leave the agency.
“This scares me. This is why I don’t tell people I work for the IRS,” one employee wrote to him in an email this week, which Carrone read in The Post.
Lorie McCann, president of the Chicago area chapter, has reminded union members not to wear their work badges outside the office to avoid drawing undue attention. Some colleagues who work in private buildings leased by the IRS have asked about security improvements at their workplace. Others who work in federal buildings have told him they worry their facilities could be attacked by domestic terrorists, he said.
“The fact that employees are afraid, I’m afraid, is sad,” said McCann, who has worked at the agency for 31 years.
NTEU president Tony Reardon wrote to Rettig on Saturday asking the commissioner to initiate a safety review.
“Employees are really concerned that all of this negative rhetoric and this climate that has developed as a result of it could lead to real threats to employees,” Reardon told The Post.
IRS workers say they are being punished for years of threats and harassment toward federal employees, and specifically those at the tax agency, long a foe of far-right groups. The agency experienced sporadic but sustained violent attacks in the 1970s and 1990s, when extremist groups targeted the IRS to express broader anti-government sentiment, experts say.
In 2010, a Texas man flew a small plane into an IRS building in Austin, killing one agency employee and injuring 13 others, after specifically espousing anti-tax conspiracy theories. Earlier this month, a gunman tried to break into an FBI office in Cincinnati days after the bureau searched Trump’s home.
That raised even more security concerns, IRS employees said.
“You have to look at the larger context where it’s not just this issue of increasing the IRS budget, but it’s this time when our government institutions are being verbally attacked and a otherwise, left and right, right now. The IRS is getting into it,” said Mark Pitcavage, senior researcher at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
Memes and other messages circulating on social media have built on GOP talking points about the IRS to call for violence toward federal employees, Pitcavage and other experts told The Post.
A channel sponsored by the far-right extremist group Proud Boys on the social media platform Telegram repeated the falsehood that new IRS hires must be “willing to use lethal force.” Other online memes compared IRS employees to Nazi SS officers and suggested that taxpayers should organize a “Tea Party” and tar and feather tax collectors.
A Republican candidate for the Florida legislature called on residents to “fire the FBI, the IRS, the ATF and every other fed in sight.”
“Our democracy is in crisis,” said Lindsay Schubiner, who studies anti-government movements at the Western States Center think tank. “And we’re seeing every week the impact of increased political violence that is directly tied to the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and white nationalist ideology.”
Drew Harwell contributed to this report.