WHAT’S IN THOSE 900 PAGES? Project 2025 argues the current structure of the IRS essentially allows the bureaucracy at the tax collector to foil any change of direction that might come from the two current political appointees, the commissioner and the chief counsel. Putting new checks on the agency is a particularly pressing matter, the initiative’s platform says, because of the tens of billions of dollars in new funding for the IRS that Democrats approved in 2022. So at a minimum, the group says there should be at least another seven IRS positions that should be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, including both deputy commissioners and the national taxpayer advocate, the agency’s in-house watchdog. It’s those proposals that bear more watching than the desire for more tax-cutting, says Howard Gleckman of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, who wrote about Project 2025 earlier this year. For starters, it’s difficult to imagine the kind of ambitious tax overhaul envisioned by Project 2025 happening anytime soon, said Gleckman — particularly something that’s likely to cost more than a straight TCJA extension, at a time when lawmakers in both parties are tossing around ideas for offsetting a next round of tax cuts. Meanwhile, reports during Trump’s first term said that he was interested in having the IRS investigate political foes. "In his retribution-promised second term, he’s likely to try again. Placing politicals in key positions at the IRS while firing career staffers would be highly consequential,” Gleckman said. But wait, there’s more: It’s not just the think tank world that has questions about bringing more political influence into the IRS. Some of the people who have been one of those two political nominees at the agency believe that, too. Former IRS chief Chuck Rettig told Tax Notes that increasing the number of political positions at the service would erode its current “impartial nature." “The IRS does not need nor should it have additional presidential appointments for leadership positions,” Rettig said. Also worth noting there: Project 2025 is sparking some concerns at the rank-and-file level of the IRS too, as Tax Notes also noted. That’s because conservatives are also angling to impose something known as Schedule F, an executive order from late in Trump’s term that gives the president more latitude to fire career federal employees. Biden scrapped Schedule F after taking office, meaning Trump would have to jump through some hoops to reinstate it. But let’s be clear: Trump himself has also not been shy in stressing that he’d be interested in more firing power over the civil service, so this isn’t just some Project 2025 creation. BUT ABOUT TAX POLICY: Harris on Friday did answer one of Weekly Tax’s big policy questions for this upcoming campaign (and perhaps for the next four years). Her campaign confirmed that the vice president would keep Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year, as our Adam Cancryn reported. And this is definitely something to look out for — Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, advocated back in 2021 for parents paying less in taxes than people without children, as ABC News noted on Friday. It all gets a bit scrambled from there: Harris’ team pounced on that old interview, as Democrats increasingly try to cast this GOP ticket as weird. That, in turn, led to Vance wondering aloud on Friday why Harris opposed the Child Tax Credit, attempting to draw a parallel between his idea and the existing federal tax break for parents. (His team, meanwhile, noted the strong Democratic support for the CTC in explaining Vance's remarks.) And of course, all of this was happening as and after Biden signed into law a large expansion of the Child Tax Credit in 2021 that allowed for monthly payments to eligible families — a program that lapsed after just a single year in large part because of widespread and entrenched GOP opposition. For the record, Harris has advocated expanding the CTC, and welcomed bipartisan legislation to do so that passed the House overwhelmingly early this year. The bill is now languishing in the Senate, amid Republican opposition to taking it up. Meanwhile, Vance has also spoken positively about that bill's expansion of the child credit. A QUICK GLOBAL LOOK: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen hasn’t been shy in throwing her weight around in international tax matters during her time in office, most notably playing a key role in striking the global tax deal for corporations negotiated through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. More recently, she’s pooh-poohed the idea of a global wealth tax modeled after that previous agreement. And now she’s also backing the primacy of the OECD in global tax affairs, after more developing nations have pushed for a larger role for the United Nations. "We don’t want to see this shifted to the UN," Yellen said late last week at a meeting of G-20 finance ministers in Rio de Janeiro. “We've made a huge amount of progress, and the UN doesn't have the technical expertise to do this."
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