The first public signal of chaos at the IRS came on February 17 when the Associated Press reported that DOGE was seeking access to the IRS’s Integrated Data Retrieval System—one of the most sensitive (I would argue the most sensitive) databases of personal information in the federal government. Privacy experts and lawmakers immediately sounded the alarm that this was no ordinary tech integration. It was a structural takeover.
Since then, the chaos has only multiplied to include leadership purges, workforce cuts, and a DOGE-hosted IRS “hackathon.” These aren’t isolated incidents. They reflect a strategic campaign to transform the IRS into a politically partisan enforcement mechanism and a lever of executive power.
This goes far beyond just administrative disorder that is expected with any administration change, which would be concerning enough on its own. This is a systematic takeover of the federal government’s fiscal core. What’s at stake is not only the architecture of how the state sees, collects, and allocates public resources, but whether a functioning democracy can survive without it.
To control the IRS is to control the operating system of the American state. That is precisely what makes this moment so dangerous. DOGE isn’t simply trying to dismantle the agency. It is trying to capture and rewire the IRS into a vehicle for executive dominance, privatized tax enforcement, and algorithmic control over public infrastructure.
Lambert here: Hence, Palantir.
Under the Trump administration, DOGE has aggressively intervened in the IRS by seeking access to sensitive taxpayer data, orchestrating mass layoffs, and eliminating public-friendly programs like Direct File. They don’t want to just dismantle the IRS. They want to further rewire it, transforming a civic institution into a political instrument. In this vision, taxation is no longer a shared obligation but a mechanism of ideological enforcement. Surveillance becomes the method, and loyalty to the president the metric. This transformation is rooted in the logic of new public management—a technocratic framework that reshapes public institutions to resemble private firms: lean, automated, data-driven, and detached from democratic accountability.
We are no longer just watching a system decay. We are watching it be consolidated to serve private power, silence dissent, and reverse the very idea of democratic taxation. It’s a constitutional breakdown. If the IRS falls, we won’t just lose an agency; we’ll lose one of the last institutional expressions of democratic obligation. Taxation is not just how we keep a number of key infrastructures running—it is how we declare what we value, who we protect, and who must answer to the public. The IRS reflects that social contract, however imperfectly, and not without deep bias. But unlike some other federal institutions, its mandate remains tenuously anchored in public law and congressional oversight. It is one of the few places where the struggle over fiscal accountability is still active and, for now, structurally possible.
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