Funding, Staffing Gaps Weaken Agency

A decade of budget cuts has left the IRS struggling to perform its basic functions, a problem exacerbated by recent congressional action. Congress recently passed a fiscal year 2026 appropriations package that cut $1.1 billion from the agency’s annual budget and rescinded most of the remaining multiyear funding provided in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to rebuild the agency, according to the CBPP’s April 9 report “Three Strikes Against Filers This Tax Season.” The base IRS budget is now 40% below its 2010 level when adjusted for inflation, the report states.

CBPP Deputy Director of Federal Tax Policy Samantha Jacoby, who authored the report, described the trend to Checkpoint as part of a long-term effort of “effectively hollowing out the agency by reducing funding.” She noted that the IRA funding was meant to give the agency “long term certainty so that it could make investments that needed to be made over multiple years,” but rescissions have since undermined that goal.

To dig deeper, visit the original article on the Thomson Reuters blog.