- Section 7217 of the U.S. tax code prohibits White House officials from requesting the initiation or termination of tax audits.
- White House officials have repeatedly attempted to interfere with nonpartisan and neutral tax enforcement, both to target perceived political opponents and to claim immunity from audits for the president and his family.
- One hundred and seventy-three Treasury Department positions are expected to be reclassified under “Schedule Policy/Career,” a new workforce category that would strip federal employees of civil service protections.
- Less than 20% of Treasury Department employees surveyed in fall 2025 expressed confidence that they could “report a suspected violation of a law, rule or regulation without experiencing retaliation.”
DATA IN THE SPOTLIGHT
The IRS has long been sheltered from political interference by its strong reliance on civil service personnel. Only two IRS positions, the commissioner and chief counsel, are “political” (i.e., appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate). The commissioner, appointed for a five-year term, is intended to hold office across presidential administrations. In addition, after revelations about President Nixon’s aspirations to use the IRS to “go after our enemies and not go after our friends,” strong legal protections were put in place to prevent political interference in tax administration. Section 7217 of the U.S. tax code prohibits White House officials, including the president and vice president, from requesting the initiation or termination of tax audits. Violations can result in fines or imprisonment.
Nonetheless, the IRS has been accused of acting in a partisan manner. In 2013, leading Republican legislators claimed that the IRS improperly targeted conservative groups for scrutiny. Investigations found serious management issues resulting in delays to tax-exemption applications for both right and left-leaning groups, but “did not find that political bias or political influence played a role,” as the NYU Tax Law Center has noted.
Concerns about politicization of the IRS re-emerged during the first Trump administration. President Trump’s second White House chief of staff, John Kelly, stated in 2022 that Trump “wanted a number of his perceived political enemies to be investigated by the Internal Revenue Service.” Whatever the president wishes may have been, the tax agency did not act upon them. A 2022 investigation by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that the IRS did not engage in improper audits of prominent Trump critics.
But the neutrality of the civil service faced new threats at the end of the first Trump term. In late 2020, President Trump issued an executive order attempting to convert many nonpartisan career civil servant positions into political appointments with a new personnel classification, “Schedule F.” The order would have removed civil service protections from a broad swath of the federal workforce but was rescinded by President Biden. “Project 2025,” the 2023 presidential transition plan from the conservative Heritage Foundation, listed reinstituting “Schedule F” as a goal for the next administration.
Scroll down for a documented timeline of the changes to neutral, apolitical tax enforcement since January 2025 ↓
You can also download a spreadsheet with the full list of available data, including the range of years for which data is available.