The ink was hardly dry on the Senate passage of the deceitfully named “Inflation Reduction Act” before the IRS issued a call for 87,000 new agents to be hired. As many are already aware, the job requirements included a willingness to use lethal force. Lethal force? For an IRS agent? Not even someone in the Justice Department with law enforcement training and supervision?
As we will soon see, this is not just about the IRS, but for the moment, let us take a closer look at this most immediate act by a justifiably mistrusted government agency.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Aside from the lethal force aspect, just what other qualifications for this new administrative army will apply? How will these people be recruited and vetted? Are there that many people competent in investigative accounting who are looking for work? Will there be selection based on ideological tests or voting history? What about red-flag-style psychological tests for people actually willing to use lethal force in an audit setting? How many would be able to pass background checks required of normal gun purchasers?
Imagine a veritable army of Antifa and BLM activists, recruited, armed, and trained by the IRS to go forth and audit. Picture such agents authorized to review every financial transaction you ever made, noting any political or charitable contributions you made, who you made them to, and any other “questionable” purchases made at conservative websites or gatherings. Imagine someone authorized and armed to shoot you dead if you object to their tender ministrations. Sound paranoid?
What would deter or stop them? The rule of law? A conscience? The Constitution they hold to be obsolete and no longer valid? A Department of Justice that sought fit to prosecute peaceful demonstrators on January 6, but ignored arson, murder, and billions of dollars of damage by rioters in 2020?
Recruiting a Praetorian Guard
Presently, there are just under 181,000 active duty US Marines. Since it is expected that military operations would be conducted under hostile conditions, any force operating in a battlefield environment must provide its own food, fuel, munitions and other supplies. This logistic tail consumes most of the manpower, leaving only about 15%, or 27,000 actual combat troops available. Since the IRS would not have such a logistics requirement, that means that the new IRS army would have potentially over three times the number of combat trained and equipped agents available as does the US Marine Corps! It actually gets worse.
The IRS 2021 annual report outlines some of the training that special agents receive. This training includes use of firearms, breaching actions, and defensive tactics, in addition to general use of force. Included are a few weeks of training in tax law, investigative methods, how to detect and identify tax evasion and money laundering and how to prove the presence of unreported income.
Anyone surviving the initial audit activities will have the opportunity to present their defense to the tax court – a court specifically for tax related matters and where most decisions cannot be appealed. It is surprisingly difficult to find information on how many cases are won by taxpayers contesting IRS actions.
If all the recruiting and training can be accomplished before the 2022 midterms, this new army of agents could be unleashed on the public, or at least a portion of the public, just in time. Could most of the Republican candidates end up defending themselves from charges of tax evasion, improper use of campaign funds, and other tax matters instead of spending their time and resources campaigning? What about all those conservative voters on whom this new army of auditors descends just before election day? Might not happen, but can we trust an organization with a history of being weaponized against the Right?
A long time building
This militarization of the IRS is not just a recent thing. An article in the Wall Street Journal in 2016 during the Obama regime, pointed out how the IRS was being armed even then. They asked a number of questions about why the IRS with 2,300 special agents at the time needed over 11 million dollars in guns, ammunition and special tactical equipment such as bullet proof vests.
The article also pointed out expenditures by other agencies besides the IRS. We will look at some of that next.
As bad as it gets
I did say that it actually gets worse. It turns out that this arming of the IRS is just the tip of the iceberg. Beginning in the time of the Clinton administration, the government has been arming up the bureaucracy to a most alarming degree. A watchdog organization, Open The Books, has been tracking government expenditures, including expenditures for arms and ammunition, for many years. Their reports are freely available and tell a story of a government that has been arming itself against an unspecified threat for over two decades.
In addition to the WSJ article mentioned before, a recent report from OpenTheBooks gives a more comprehensive picture of just how our government has been militarizing our executive agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture, Social Security, and even the Plant and Animal Inspection Service.
I understand that school discipline has become a problem in recent years, but Department of Education employees shooting unruly students seems a bit extreme, especially in light of other events in Texas and elsewhere.
Likewise, are our veterans really so demanding of the benefits they were promised that it is necessary to fend them off with armed guards?
The State Department has purchased an undisclosed number of M134D systems. For those who don’t know, the M134D is a vehicle mounted six barrel Gatling gun capable of firing in excess of 2000 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition per minute. Perhaps they decided to take a more proactive stance for embassy defense after Benghazi?
Who is the enemy?
One could go on, but I would direct interested parties to obtain and review the openthebooks report. There are now over 200,000 Federal employees authorized to carry firearms, a number several times greater than the combined combat forces in our military. One wonders who these people are armed against as it seems unlikely that they are intended to be used in overseas combat.
While this arming of Federal employees started largely during the Clinton administration, it ramped up dramatically during the Obama era. In addition to huge purchases of handguns, rifles, shotguns, and military gear of all sorts, Obama purchased over one billion rounds of ammunition – enough for a triple tap of every man, woman, and child in the US with rounds left over. It was claimed that the ammunition would be used for target practice, although the specific targets were not named.
Now we have a new appropriation for the IRS to hire and equip an additional 87,000 agents with arms and ammunition. Interestingly this is during yet another Democrat administration. What plans are they not telling us about?
If history is any guide…
One aspect of this arming up of an administrative army is particularly concerning. The US military is constrained by the Posse Comitatus Act which states:
” Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”
Although the reference cited is decidedly Left wing in its discussion, it does give a reasonable description of the Act and its limitations. It omits, however, one particular aspect of relevance here. The Act does not apply to non-military armed agents of the Federal government.
In the normal course of events, such as existed prior to Clinton, agencies that needed armed assistance in carrying out their duties would solicit the assistance of the Department of Justice, such as the FBI, who had both legitimate firepower as well as extensive training and experience in law enforcement, and were (mostly) unlikely to overreact in a typical situation. That meant, though, that the uncontrolled firepower available to the administration was limited. In order to increase discretionary forces, it was necessary to expand the activities deemed to be law enforcement to the point where each agency could build its own armed force.
This expansion has led to the buildup of an armed force that can be used at the discretion of the administration against the ordinary citizens of our republic.
It seems telling that the Federal government is doing all it can to subvert the 2nd Amendment and disarm the populace, while at the same time it is arming up a Federal force with all sorts of weapons, including fully automatic weapons of war.
The real need for gun control
Clearly, we need to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, such as psychopaths and administrative state functionaries. We don’t need a parallel army not subject to legal restraints.
By David Robb
David Robb is a regular contributor to The Blue State Conservative and a practicing scientist who has been working in industry for over 50 years. One of his specialties is asking awkward questions. A large part of his work over the years has involved making complex scientific issues clear and understandable to non-specialists. Sometimes he even succeeds.
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