Comment The Internal Revenue Service will begin a full security review of its facilities nationwide, Commissioner Charles Retting announced Tuesday, as congressional Republicans and far-right extremists attack the agency and the new funding it is slated to receive in a massive expenses. “We’re looking at what’s out there in terms of social media. Our workforce is concerned about their safety,” Rettig told the Washington Post in an interview. “The comments made are extremely disrespectful to the organization, the workers and the country.” In a letter to employees sent Tuesday, he wrote that the agency will conduct risk assessments of each of the IRS’s 600 facilities and evaluate whether to increase security patrols along building exteriors, strengthen restricted area designations , will review security around entrances and assess exterior lighting. It will be the agency’s first such assessment since the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people. “For me this is personal,” Rettig wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Post. “I will continue to make every effort to dispel any lingering misconceptions about our work. And I will continue to advocate for your safety in every space where I have an audience. You go above and beyond every day and I am honored to work with each and every one of you.” The IRS is set to receive $80 billion in new funding over 10 years as part of President Biden’s landmark inflation-reduction law. The money is designed to help the agency increase its scrutiny of tax fraud and increase enforcement of the law on high-income individuals and large corporations, including a major hiring push to help the IRS address more than a decade of underfunding. But Republicans have used the taxman’s funding to attack the law, which also includes funding to address the climate crisis and lower health care costs. GOP members of Congress falsely claimed that many of the agency’s 87,000 new hires would be armed and that the new enforcement measures would target low- and middle-income taxpayers and small businesses. Many Republicans have drawn unwarranted comparisons between the new IRS enforcement funding and the FBI’s investigation into former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. “They have 80,000 employees. You know what the IRS has too? 4,600 guns. 5 million cartridges. Why; Democrats want to double its already massive size,” House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) said on the House floor this month, days after the FBI probe. “With this new power, the IRS will flood your bank account, your Venmo, your small business. Then the government will shake you for every last cent,” he added. “Under the light of [the FBI’s search of Trump’s residence]let me ask: Do you really trust this administration’s IRS to be fair, not to abuse their power?’ “Think about it: If the left arms the FBI to raid President Trump’s personal residence, it will surely arm the new 87,000 IRS agents, many of whom will be trained to use lethal force, to go after any American citizen.” Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.) said this month on the House floor. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, wrote an open letter last week to job seekers discouraging them from applying for a job at the IRS. His letter draws on a job posting for an IRS criminal investigator — a position that requires issuing search warrants and making arrests — to suggest that all new IRS hires “should be prepared to screen and investigate the fellow hardworking Americans, your neighbors and friends, you must be ready and, to use the words of the IRS, willingto kill them.” In fact, of the more than 78,000 IRS employees, fewer than 3,000 work in criminal investigations and carry firearms. “This is a blow to the reputation of IRS employees and the IRS and our country,” Rettig said. “… That speech [about armed IRS agents] it needs to be put into context about what might be accurate and what is completely false, and that seems to be missing from the dialogue out there. This country would not function without a functioning Internal Revenue Service.” Workers told The Post that right-wing rhetoric has raised fears that workers could be targeted in their workplaces or in public if they are identified as IRS employees. David Carrone, president of the Louisiana-Arkansas National Treasury Employees Union chapter, has tried to assuage colleagues’ concerns in recent days and convince them not to quit the service. “That scares me. This is why I don’t tell people I work for the IRS,” one employee wrote to him in an email this week, which Carrone read to The Post. Lorie McCann, president of the Chicago area chapter, reminded union members not to wear their badges outside the office to avoid drawing undue attention. Some colleagues who work in private buildings leased by the IRS have asked about safety improvements in their workplace. Others who work in federal buildings have told her they worry their facility could be targeted by domestic terrorists, she said. “The fact that workers are afraid — I am — it’s sad,” said McCann, who has been with the agency for 31 years. NTEU president Tony Reardon wrote to Rettig on Saturday asking the commissioner to launch a safety review. “Workers are really concerned that all of this negative rhetoric and this climate that has been created as a result can lead to real threats to workers,” Reardon told The Post. IRS workers say they are being punished by years of threats and harassment against federal employees, specifically those in the Internal Revenue Service, a long-time enemy of right-wing extremist groups. The agency experienced sporadic but ongoing violent attacks between the 1970s and 1990s, when extremist groups targeted the IRS to express broader anti-government sentiment, experts say. In 2010, a Texas man flew a small plane into an IRS building in Austin, killing one IRS employee and injuring 13 others, after espousing anti-tax conspiracy theories. Earlier this month, a gunman tried to break into the FBI office in Cincinnati just days after the office searched Trump’s home. That raised further security concerns, IRS officials said. “You have to look at the larger context where it’s not just this issue about the increase in the IRS budget, but it’s right now where our government agencies are being attacked verbally and otherwise, left and right, right now. The IRS is integrated into it,” said Mark Pitcavage, senior researcher at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. Memes and other messages circulating on social media have drawn GOP talking points about the IRS calling for violence against federal employees, Pitcavage and other experts told The Post. A channel sponsored by the far-right extremist group Proud Boys on the social media platform Telegram repeated the lie that new IRS recruits had to be “willing to use lethal force.” Other online memes likened IRS officials to Nazi SS officers and suggested taxpayers organize a “tea party” and tar and feather tax collectors. A Republican candidate for the Florida Legislature called on residents to “shoot the FBI, the IRS, the ATF and every other feeder in sight.” “Our democracy is in crisis,” said Lindsay Schubiner, who studies anti-government movements at the think tank Western States Center. “And we see every week the impact of increasing political violence directly linked to the incorporation of conspiracy theories and white nationalist ideology.” Drew Harwell contributed to this report.
