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The acting head of the Internal Revenue Service intends to resign after disagreeing with the decision to share tax information on illegal immigrants with federal law enforcement.
Commissioner Melanie Krause will be the third IRS head to leave the agency since the beginning of the year. The agency has been volatile because left-wing ideologues have chosen to pursue their political leanings despite their promise to serve as nonpartisan government workers.
On Monday, the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security reached an agreement that allows taxpayer data to be shared with federal immigration officials to help them locate unauthorized immigrants.
According to the Washington Post, Treasury Department officials, who oversee the IRS, had largely disregarded Krause recently as they sought to provide immigration authorities access to sensitive taxpayer information, most likely because they knew she would reject the arrangement.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem approved the data-sharing pact despite IRS attorneys’ concerns that it would likely violate federal privacy rules, according to the article.
“Melanie Krause has been leading the IRS through a time of extraordinary change,” a Treasury official said in an emailed statement announcing her departure.
Without addressing the data arrangement, the representative said that the agency was “in the midst of breaking down data silos that have for too long stood in the way of identifying waste, fraud, and abuse and bringing criminals to justice.”
Doug O’Donnell, Krause’s predecessor, resigned as acting commissioner in February after rejecting to sign a similar data-sharing deal with the Department of Homeland Security. Danny Werfel, the last Senate-confirmed IRS commissioner, resigned on President Donald Trump’s first day in office.
According to a source familiar with her choice, Krause has opted to apply for the IRS’s existing postponed resignation program. The individual, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, stated that her decision to step down was driven in part by worries over the newly concluded data-sharing pact, according to Reuters.
On Friday, the IRS began enacting massive labor cutbacks, demolishing its civil rights office and commencing mass firings that may result in the loss of up to 25% of its workers.
The layoffs are part of a larger reform of the government workforce, which has already resulted in the elimination of nearly 200,000 jobs. President Donald Trump has named billionaire Elon Musk to oversee the endeavor to reform and simplify the federal government through his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team.
Earlier this month, Musk told Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz that “magic money computers” within the US government generate payments “out of thin air,” keeping legislators in the dark about federal expenditures.
Musk said on Cruz’s show that 14 mechanisms exist inside the US Treasury and other institutions that transfer big funds without supporting proof.
Musk argued that in departments housing one of these systems, reported spending may be inaccurate by up to 5% of the budget when given to Congress, but Cruz indicated that these illegal payments could amount to “trillions” of dollars.
“They’re mostly at Treasury,” Musk said of the computers identified by his U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. “But there’s some at [Health and Human Services], one or two at State, and some at [the Department of Defense].”
“I believe we’ve uncovered 14 magic money computers. “They just send money out of nowhere,” he informed the Texas Republican Senator.
The unusual entrepreneur elaborated on DOGE’s revelation, claiming that the presence of these machines prevented the Treasury Department from completely notifying parliamentarians about the federal government’s entire spending.
“You may believe that all government computers interact with one another, synchronize, and precisely determine where monies are going, so the numbers you see as a senator are correct. “They’re not,” he explained.
