The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is reportedly changing how it operates in order to comply with a recent directive by President Donald Trump to target organizations his administration claims are funded by “antifa.”
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the IRS’s Criminal Investigation division (IRS-CI) is installing Trump loyalists in key roles and weakening the effectiveness of IRS lawyers in assisting with certain cases, a move that will make it far easier to engage in politically motivated inquiries and more difficult to provide oversight. The plan includes replacing long-time IRS-CI chief Guy Ficco with someone more loyal to Trump, and targeting key Democratic and progressive donors, such as billionaire George Soros.
The Trump administration claims the changes to the IRS are necessary in order to crack down on “left-wing violence.” But the changes actually appear to be a partisan attempt to quell dissent and attack the president’s political enemies — tellingly, the administration is not seeking to combat right-wing violence, which is many times more rampant and deadly than violence from the left in the U.S.
Commentators have condemned the changes coming to the IRS as illegal.
“It is a full-blown federal felony crime for anyone in the White House or Executive Office of the President to order tax investigations into anyone,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, which could potentially be targeted by the administration.
The changes come as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has announced that his department is seeking to target left-leaning groups. In comments on “The Charlie Kirk Show” earlier this week, Bessent said the Treasury Department “became the driving force behind tracking down the networks of terrorist organizations.”
“I will tell you that Charlie’s death is like a domestic 9/11 moment,” Bessent went on, suggesting that using the department’s resources to go after left-leaning groups under the guise of combating funders of “terrorism” is somehow justified.
None of the evidence released to the public indicates that the gunman who killed Kirk was financed by a group, or that he was part of an organization that advances political violence as a means to achieve larger ends.
Despite this, Bessent claimed his department has “started to compile lists of the other networks,” and that “This is mission-critical for us now.”
The department’s shift in priorities is in line with a national security memo Trump signed late last month, which expanded on an executive order he had previously signed naming “antifa” — a term short for “anti-fascist” — a domestic terrorist organization.
No large-scale antifa organization actually exists, and presidents do not have the legal authority to designate groups as domestic terrorists.
Within that directive, Trump offered a vague framework for which people and organizations could be considered “antifa”; supposedly qualifying factors include “anti-capitalist” or “anti-Christian” views and being “extreme” on issues of “migration, race and gender.”
The directive also orders the IRS to “take action to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism,” and to refer “such organizations, and the employees and officers of such organizations, to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution.”
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