Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SMITH of Missouri. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Nebraska for yielding.

House Republicans made a promise to the American people to fight for working-class families. And we made a promise that our first order of business under a new Republican majority would be to repeal the $80 billion Democrats gave the IRS to hire 87,000 new agents to target American working-class families.

We are delivering on that promise today.

This bill rescinds the IRS funds in the Inflation Reduction Act--a law that does nothing to combat inflation but everything to empower an agency that has targeted Americans. They have leaked taxpayer information, and under the Biden administration, they threatened to snoop into the bank accounts of millions of middle-class families.

We know this because President Biden wrote such a proposal into his first budget as part of his agenda to expand the power of the IRS and shovel billions more to this troubled agency.

At that time, we asked the Joint Committee on Taxation how many Americans might be subject to such a scheme to spy into their bank accounts. The JCT said that up to 134 million taxpayers could be targeted.

So much for just going after the millionaires and the billionaires that our Democrat colleagues like to talk about.

While the Biden administration--including Treasury Secretary Yellen-- has tried to dismiss concerns over how middle-class Americans would be targeted by the IRS, under the Democrats' $80 billion infusion of cash, the Congressional Budget Office has affirmed undoubtedly families making less than $400,000 per year would be subjected to increased enforcement and, yes, audits by the IRS.

But of course this would be the case when you realize that more than half of the $80 billion Democrats gave the IRS is earmarked for enforcement.

The IRS does not need a raise. It needs a reckoning. And what starts today with rescinding this $80 billion continues through rigorous IRS oversight that Democrats ignored under their one-party rule.

Taxpayers deserve true oversight for an agency that leaked the tax returns of thousands of American taxpayers at the same time the White House was calling for tax increases on those individuals. We are talking about an agency with a history of targeting conservatives with woefully underperforming customer service and whose own commissioner under Obama called this $80 billion more than three times the amount of money the agency actually needed.

House Republicans are ready to provide oversight and accountability, and that starts today with ending this $80 billion pay raise.

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