WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - The Inflation Reduction Act will empower unions even more by funding the employment of more Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents who are union members, according to a union watchdog.
The U.S. House and Senate both approved the proposed legislation, which will increase funding for the IRS to the tune of $80 billion.
“The president will very likely sign into law the measure that will add 87,000 IRS agents to the federal payroll, whom the vast majority will likely join – and pay dues to – the government employee union,” said Aaron Withe, CEO of the Freedom Foundation.
Forbes reported that an increase in IRS funding and IRS agents could eventually result in an increase in taxpayer audits.
“The American people have been calling for a lot of things but doubling the number of agents at the IRS certainly wasn’t one of them,” Withe told the Southern California Record. “So now America’s political leaders have doubled the size of an agency that has already weaponized itself against those taxpayers it deems its political opponents, and is doing so using the very taxpayer dollars of the people they despise."
Withe also complained that government employee unions are the single largest funders of radical leftists in the United States using taxpayer dollars.
For example, the National Education Association (NEA) gained some $2.4 million in dues last year for a total of $377.4 million so far this year and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) collected nearly $11 million more in 2021 than in 2020 for a total so far of $196.7 million.
“The heads of the SEIU, AFSCME, and the teachers’ unions derive their power by bankrolling leftist political campaigns with the money they take from their members’ paychecks,” Withe said. “And now these union bosses just guaranteed themselves a lot more power, at taxpayer’s expense, with the Inflation Reduction Act.”
The union representing IRS workers has given $601,759 in PAC funding to Democrat party committees, according to OpenSecrets.
“The IRS proved itself blatantly political more than a decade ago after Lois Lerner shredded any question of objectivity when she was caught harassing and discriminating against organizations that included in their names the words ‘patriot’, ‘constitution’, ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’,” added Withe.