The GOP is Defunding the Tax Policy, Making America Great for Rich Tax Cheats
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency [in 2016]. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
—The New York Times, September 27, 2020
Trump Organization found guilty of tax fraud in scheme hatched by top executives
—PBS, December 6, 2022
Frank J. Bisignano is the Chief Executive Officer of the Internal Revenue Servicewhen he is not working as the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Yes, he simultaneously holds both positions. Bisignano told Congress that the current IRS staffing level is perfect. There is reason to be skeptical about Bisignano’s claim, and not just because there is no dedicated full-time CEO of the IRS. The IRS workforce was cut by 27 percent last year. There are fewer people working at the IRS today than there were in the mid-1980s while our tax system has become more complex and the population has grown by 50 percent.
President Trump’s budget calls for a cut of $1.4 billion or 12.5 percent from the IRS’ budget. This is after IRS funding was cut 9 percent last year, the fourth consecutive year of flat or reduced funding.
This was not supposed to happen. Seeing that the IRS was grossly understaffed, was operating using technology from the 1960s, and was using places like a cafeteria and hallways as storage rooms for some of the 10.2 million unprocessed paper tax returns, the Biden administration succeeded in obtaining funding for the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 to address these and other problems. ButRepublicans outmaneuvered the Democrats in the following years, and now much of that funding has been clawed back. This continues the tradition of Republican leaders attacking IRS, making it easier for the rich to avoid paying their taxes.
A major problem for our country’s finances is that there is about $700 billion per year in tax evasion. This means that the country has larger deficits and has more difficulty paying for all the things the government does like health care, education, veterans’ benefits, and so on. Most of this tax evasion occurs among the rich.Nearly 30 percent of unpaid tax dollars are due to tax evasion from the richest 1 percent. Half of all unpaid tax dollars are due to the top 5 percent.
The Yale Budget Lab estimated that the increased IRS funding in the Inflation Reduction Act would have brought in over $600 billion in revenue over 10 years. Now, because of the success of the anti-IRS movement by Republicans in Congress, much of that revenue is lost. The IRS division that audits billionaires has been pushed to cut 38 percent of its staff.
Billionaire tax cheats are breathing easier.
This first appeared on CEPR.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren said the bill would stop Trump from “trying to snatch up billions of taxpayer dollars to line his own pockets and settle personal scores.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) questions Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on February 5, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Brad Reed
Apr 15, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
Four Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday unveiled legislation aimed at ending what they described as President Donald Trump’s “plunder” of US taxpayers.
The Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act—cosponsored by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Dave Min (D-Calif.)—was crafted in response to Trump’s effort to get the federal Internal Revenue Service to hand him a $10 billion settlement for the 2020 leak of his tax records and his demand that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) pay him $230 million over its past criminal investigations of him.
Among other things, the bill would bar both the president and the vice president, as well as their immediate family members, from collecting settlement payments from the federal government while in office.
The proposed legislation would also prohibit both the president and the vice president from filing administrative claims for damages while in office, and would only allow presidents and vice presidents to “collect compensatory damages awarded by a federal court if the court appoints an independent counsel to represent the agency and makes all proceedings public.”
The bill allows former presidents and vice presidents to collect damages from the federal government, but only if the agency being sued “appoints career expert staff to lead the agency’s review or adjudication of any administrative claim brought by the former president/VP, and no official appointed by any president/VP is involved in handling the claim.”
Additionally, any settlement made to a former president or vice president must be made public within seven days.
Warren said that the legislation was necessary to stop Trump from “trying to snatch up billions of taxpayer dollars to line his own pockets and settle personal scores.”
Raskin accused Trump of exploiting the power of his office to “loot billions of dollars from American taxpayers,” an operation that he described as the “ongoing scandal of this ruthlessly corrupt administration.”
“The ‘Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act’ will prevent the president from pursuing the emerging MAGA grift of suing the government as a ‘plaintiff’ on bogus grounds,” Raskin added, “and then settling the suit as ‘defendant’ for big bucks, a collusive settlement scam they recently executed with the disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who waltzed off with more than a million dollars for a bogus claim already dismissed by a federal court.”
Flynn settled with the DOJ last month in a case in which he accused the government of “improperly and politically” targeting him, after he was charged with making false statements to the FBI in 2017.
The Democrats’ bill has earned the endorsements of government watchdogs Democracy Defenders Action, Common Cause, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).
Debra Perlin, vice president of policy at CREW, praised the bill for establishing “common sense guardrails to protect against corrupt payouts to the president and the vice president during their terms in office and after they depart.”
“Since returning to office, Donald Trump keeps finding troubling new ways to enrich himself at the taxpayers’ expense,” Perlin noted. “The president’s lawsuit against the IRS for $10 billion is emblematic of a pattern of self-dealing and corruption that appears pervasive in his administration.”
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