Rather than focusing solely on President Trump’s mostly aborted tariff plan or his mass deportation immigration strategy, Rachel Maddow turned her attention Wednesday night to some troubling recent happenings at the IRS – a mass exodus.
“One of the good indicators that something really big is going wrong is when you get news that people who have really big jobs in one part of the government — they all leave,” Maddow noted. “That is a pretty reliable sign that something quite big and quite bad is happening, and you only see these things every so often, even in an administration as disastrous as this one.”
The “Rachel Maddow Show” anchor then ran down the list of executives who have left the IRS in recent days, including the agency’s Chief Financial Officer, Chief of Staff and Chief Risk Officer. Despite only being in the position for six weeks, the Acting Head of the IRS also resigned, reportedly over the Trump administration’s plan to give sensitive tax data to immigration authorities.
“That’s a lot of people to have to fire your way through, right?” Maddow remarked. You can watch the host’s full IRS segment yourself in the video below.
“[Trump officials] appear to just be wrecking the IRS wholesale in the same way they’ve been taking apart the Social Security administration,” Maddow observed. “I understand the implications of that for Social Security. It means disabled people and old people are not going to get the checks they need that pay their rent and pay for their food and pay for their medicine, and — in some cases — that’s the only income they have.”
“At the IRS, we are seeing a similar kind of wrecking ball start to level that [agency], and the Trump administration is cutting a quarter of the people who work there,” Maddow continued. “That has implications, among other things, in terms of how much tax revenue is expected to be brought in by the IRS.” The MSNBC anchor added that the Justice Department is also “talking now about effectively closing the whole tax enforcement division at the Justice Department, which is the part of the Justice Department that prosecutes tax crimes.”
“So, we’re wrecking the IRS. We’re doing something so controversial [there] that it has caused the mass exodus of all of the top executives at the agency, including some of whom came on board or got their current jobs during Trump, and we’re going to stop prosecuting tax crimes,” Maddow concluded. “What happens to our country if the Trump administration breaks the IRS?”
You can watch the full “Rachel Maddow Show” segment in the video above.
