Eccentric billionaire and the head of the new US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Elon Musk has recently posted a survey to his X feed. In it, he asked his 216 million followers: ‘Would you like DOGE to audit the IRS?’
One might think that a simple X poll is not a matter of great consequence. However, please note that Musk has based his decision to unban Donald Trump on his social media platform on a community poll as well.
Musk cheekily gave two affirmative options, ‘Yes’ and ‘F Yes’. With about 1.9 million users voting, only 8.2 per cent voted no. After the poll was closed on 5 February, Musk replied with the same Latin phrase ‘VOX POPULI VOX DEI’, meaning ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’, that he used in response to his poll voting in favour of unbanning President Trump back in November 2022.
The final result is no surprise, given that the Internal Revenue Service, the agency tasked with collecting tax revenue from US residents, has a very bad reputation in American popular culture, for obvious reasons. President Trump himself has leveraged that on the campaign trail, and attacked the Democrats for hiring 87,000 new IRS agents under the cover of the 2022 Inflaction Reduction Act. After he took office, President Trump even floated the idea of sending the new IRS agents to the Southern border for border patrol duty.
Musk’s latest initiative is also reminiscent of an old popular slogan of the libertarian movement of the 2010s, ‘audit the Fed’.
Meanwhile, the DOGE head has already taken some action on the tax agency, with his announcement on 4 February that he has ‘deleted 18F’, the team of software engineers within the IRS in charge of the Direct File programme. This has caused some confusion among the public as many are using Direct File to submit their tax forms digitally. However, as of the time of writing this, Directfile.irs.gov is still operational and is running in its old format. An anonymous IRS insider has also confirmed to Reuters that the tax returns submitted through direct file are still being received and processed by the agency.
Earlier this month Musk dropped another bombshell about another ‘all-powerful’ government body also—where else—on his X feed. He has claimed that payment approval officers within the US Treasury Department were instructed to approve all payments, regardless of whether it was fraudulent or it supported terrorist groups. ‘They literally never denied a payment in their entire career. Not even once,’ Musk wrote about the workers within the UST tasked with adjudicating payment requests.
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