I post today on an excellent article—Geraldine Brooks, The Cyber Sleuth (WAPO 10/1/24), here. This is one article in a WAPO series on “Who is Government?” where seven writers are said to “go in search of the essential public servant.” The articles in the series with author of each article are:
- The Sentinel: Casey Cep on the Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Searchers: Dave Eggers on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab
- The Number: John Lanchester on the Bureau of Labor Statistics
- The Cyber Sleuth: Geraldine Brooks on the Internal Revenue Service
- The Equalizer: Sarah Vowell on the National Archives
- The Rookie: W. Kamau Bell on the Department of Justice
Each article in the series (so far) is outstanding. It is appropriate that Michael Lewis starts with the first installment because of his book, The Fifth Risk, which has been described as “a love letter to federal workers -- and a dig at Trump’s ‘willful ignorance’.” See WAPO book review here. Lewis tells a great story of the bureaucracy—the deep state, if you will—and how much the bureaucrats do for the country, keeping the country on an even keel in turbulent times (particularly the first (and hopefully the only) Trump administration where chaos reigned as Trump haphazardly filled the ranks of political appointees to the agencies).
The Cyber Sleuth installment deals with Jarod Koopman, an IRS “Cyber Sleuth.” Koopman is an example of IRS employees and government employees generally who bring dedication and unique skill to the mission of the IRS, an agency that Congress chronically underfunds seemingly to hamper the IRS’s ability to do the tasks Congress assigned it to do. The article says:
Until last year, the staff who work inside had watched their budget get cut for a decade. Their staffing numbers had reached lows not seen since the 1970s, even as the U.S. population swelled and the quantity of tax returns soared. There was no money to update failing technology, or even the software that ran it. The result was a pileup of paper returns that colonized corridors and cafeterias, and an American public vexed by poor service.
That, of course, was the goal: anti-tax activist Grover Norquist’s famous shrink-it-till-you-can-sink-it strategy. So the civil servants who had been valiantly struggling to serve more people with fewer resources found themselves unappreciated — even despised.
And perhaps most despised are the 3 percent of IRS personnel involved in criminal investigation, who have become piñatas for the agency’s critics. Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade characterized agents such as Koopman as dangerous threats who could “hunt down and kill middle-class taxpayers,” while Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) accused them of “committing armed robbery on Americans.” Republicans even attached a rider to a spending bill limiting the number of bullets the IRS can buy. “A weapon is rarely discharged by one of our agents,” says a frustrated Werfel. “But you can’t send an agent into a criminal enterprise unarmed, so they have to train, and there’s a minimum inventory required for that.”