The quiet courage of frank and fearless leadership
Bloomberg, IRS to Lose 22% of Taxpayer Service Workers After Trump Purge:
The IRS should quickly hire thousands of new taxpayer service employees so it’s prepared for next year’s filing season, given the agency is losing more than one-fifth of those workers under Trump administration-directed oncuts, the National Taxpayer Advocate said in her mid-year report.
The Trump administration should lift its hiring freeze and the agency needs direct-hire authority to fill key roles by the end of the summer ahead of the 2026 season, Erin Collins, the national taxpayer advocate who runs an independent office inside the IRS, said. The IRS’s Taxpayer Services division, which helps consumers with questions on their taxes and processes returns, is expected to lose about 22% of its 42,134 workers.
- Susannah Camic Tahk (Wisconsin; Google Scholar), The Tax Separation of Powers, 78 Tax Law. 167 (2025)
- Bret Wells (Houston; Google Scholar), Ruminations on Negative Basis, Rev. Rul. 68-55, and Bigfoot Fallacies, 78 Tax Law. 225 (2025)
- Mindy Herzfeld (Florida), 2024 Erwin N. Griswold Lecture Before the American College of Tax Counsel: Globalization and its Fallout: Ten Years of International Tax Tumult, 78 Tax Law. 255 (2025)
Musk calls Bannon a ‘fat, drunken slob’ and says he should be arrested as their feud rages on The Independent
Elon Musk’s proposed new political party could focus on a few pivotal congressional seats The Guardian
Elon Musk floats strategy for new political partyAxios
Air Force Halts Project With Musk’s SpaceX Daily
Turns Out Appeasing Trump Only Emboldened Him
The American Prospect: “…Biden appointed a milquetoast moderate, Merrick Garland, as attorney general, and as The New York Timesand Washington Post reported in detail, he initially refused to prosecute Trump on his globally televised sedition and insurrection, instead attempting a traditional organized crime roll-up that went nowhere and ate up months.
It wasn’t until the January 6th Committee made Garland look like an idiot that he finally got moving in November 2022—eighteen months after Biden took office—and it was special counsel Jack Smith who actually put the cases together, relatively quickly.
These years of delay allowed Trump’s cronies on the Supreme Court to successfully delay the resulting trials out past the 2024 election. When Trump repeatedly refused to return classified documents he had stolen from the National Archives, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago only with extreme reluctance, and did not arrest him. When the Colorado Supreme Court threw him off the 2024 ballot in that state, the national Supreme Court quickly put him back on.
In short, the American law enforcement apparatus, egged on by many prominent liberal and lefty academics and commentators, bent over backwards to provide the appearance of due process—which is to say that Trump got to get away with outrageous things no other defendant would have, like refusing FBI requests during a legal search, or repeatedly violating a judge’s order not to attack the judge’s daughter on social media. (Needless to say, this is the opposite of due process: It is letting a powerful person violate the rules.)
We now see the results of granting Trump his second, third, and 50th legal chances: He is attempting to turn the United States into a fascist dictatorship. Immigrants and other enemies of the regime are being kidnapped off the street by ICE goons with no due process, and stuffed into concentration camps Trump is opening around the country, like the Alligator Auschwitz in Florida, or sent to slave labor camps in foreign countries. Already, people are starting to die in the cramped and unsanitary conditions. Senate Republicans just passed a bill that, among other things, would balloon the ICE and deportation budget up to $175 billion—giving it more money than the Marines or indeed any military save that of China and the U.S., and giving Trump his own gestapo. Now Trump is openly threatening to strip people of their citizenship and deport them, including Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who recently won New York’s Democratic mayoral primary. As usual under fascism, Trump is also engaged in monumental corruption. He just collected a straight-up $16 millionbribe from Paramount, which settled a preposterous lawsuit against 60 Minutes because it wants merger approval from Trump. As the Times recently reported, Trump’s finances (which were quite shaky in late 2024) have since improved greatly thanks to various cryptocurrency schemes—an Abu Dhabi investment firm said it would use Trump’s stablecoin to buy Binance for $2 billion—and hawking crummy products to his devoted followers.