On Friday, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) released a report on the impact that DOGE has had on IRS staffing, between the firing of probationary workers and the deferred resignation program (in which workers could resign while receiving pay through September 30th). The report shows that while 11% of total IRS staffers have departed, the proportion is much higher among revenue agents (i.e., tax auditors): 31%.
There is also new reporting today from Bloomberg that the Trump Administration has decided to shut down the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF), a Reagan-era creation whose annual budget is $550 million and whose investigations netted more than $2 billion in forfeitures from criminals over the past two years, as of September 30th. Notwithstanding its name, OCEDTF’s mission focuses not just on drug trafficking, but more broadly on “illicit finance, human smuggling and trafficking, organized retail crime, sophisticated financial fraud, cyber-enabled crime, firearms trafficking, export violations, government benefits theft, business e-mail compromise, other federal criminal offenses, and U.S. sanctions evasion”.
Both of these actions appear broadly consistent with Trump’s apparent de-emphasis on combatting white-collar crime (including tax evasion).
In other news, the Department of Homeland Security today announced a new program under which individuals who voluntarily self-deport can receive free airfare and a $1,000 stipend. By comparison, it is apparently costing the federal government in excess of $17,000 on average to carry out each deportation. I remember when the word “self-deportation” got some attention in the 2012 Republican primary, but back then it was more in the context of creating conditions that would encourage those without legal documents to leave voluntarily, rather than paying them to do it at a time of their own choosing so as to avoid the risk of being rounded up and deported involuntarily.
Trump’s latest tariff salvo, announced last night via social media, is a proposed 100% tariff on foreign-made films, claiming (as he probably has to, in order to assert the authority to take this action) that foreign-made films are a “national security threat”. Nobody appears to really understand what this would actually mean or how it would help the domestic film industry, and today the White House is saying that “no final decisions have been made” on foreign film tariffs.
When I lived in Evanston, Illinois a quarter-century ago, our congresswoman was Jan Schakowsky, who was first elected to represent the Illinois 9th in 1998 and has long been one of the most progressive Democrats in Congress. Now 80, she announced today that she will not be running for a 15th term in 2026. This makes at least two very interesting Democratic primaries in Illinois for the upcoming cycle, in the wake of 80-year-old Senator Durbin’s recent announcement that he will not run for a 6th term in 2026. I see both announcements as a positive step in combatting our nation’s slide into gerontocracy.
In other election decision news, Republican Georgia Governor Kemp has just announced he will not challenge first-term Democratic Senator Ossoff in 2026, which is considered very good news for a Democratic party that is facing a tough Senate map in 2026.