FBI, IRS Challenged

Two pillars of our Federal government – the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service– were created during the Wilson Presidency a bit more than a century ago.  Both now face the challenge of combating declining public esteem, but take very different histories into today’s political environment. 

Which will play better?

Each has gained great power over the years albeit at the cost of public suspicion and the Trump adventure has created a new focus on each.  Both are big, powerful and feared and rely on a large disciplined staff collecting an enormous amount of information in their quest to keep America solvent and safe.  Most of us have an annual encounter, sometimes stressful with the IRS, but few have any direct contact with the Bureau.

Despite some superficial similarities 

They are very different, largely because the FBI was the careful creation of its director for life, J. Edgar Hoover, while the IRS has been headed by a series of less than memorable commissioners remembered by few outside the tax community.

No one is about to write a riveting history of the IRS that will compete with Beverly Gage’s compelling new biography of Hoover that portrays him as a flawed human being who created an institution that flourished partly because of his political skills that ranged from creating the FBI Academy and crime lab that improved and influenced state and local law enforcement  to his ability to do dirty work for the Presidents who retained him.

Hoover’s clear conservative political and racial tilt had its limits, allowing the FBI to respond effectively if reluctantly to civil rights cases and ultimately putting him at odds with Nixon, the President he had personally been closest to, culminating in the complexity and murkiness of Watergate, an incident that began with the FBI’s refusal to indulge in the illegal dirty tricks ultimately committed by the Republican plumbers and ended with its efforts to embarrass, if not oust, Nixon.

The IRS, by contrast, was characterized by an internal integrity and political indifference.  Headed by a political appointee who chronically lacked Hoover’s independent political power, it nonetheless consistently resisted White House pressure to audit or release damaging information about political opponents.

In the FBI the director ruled to the point of long denying workers civil service protection. At the IRS, the commissioner is allowed by the bureaucracy to think he or she reigns.

Today’s headlines suggest the IRS was more intimidated by the White House than the FBI was, perhaps because it lacked leadership with the independent power Hoover had.

Hoover’s links to powerful Members of Congress were augmented by former FBI agents who subsequently became Members of Congress.  One of the Republicans who voted to impeach Nixon began his career as an FBI agent.  If anyone who ever worked for the IRS was ever elected to Congress, they didn’t brag about it.  I doubt it has ever happened.

Neither agency has been able to sidestep the recent decline in public support.  From 2003 to 2021 the number seeing the FBI as doing an excellent or good job declined from  54% to 44% while the segment characterizing it as doing a poor job doubled from 12% to 24%.  For the IRS those rating its performance as excellent or good went from 44% to 37%.

That suggests Hoover’s marketing initiatives – books, movies and television shows – don’t have great residual impact.   Some of its largely conservative supporters, aided by internal leaks Hoover never would have tolerated, have turned critical.  The Service has never had the luxury of worrying about a non-existent fan base eroding.

Washington relies on both agencies.  Without the IRS, it would go broke and investment in the IRS is cost-effective with each dollar appropriated yielding far more than a dollar in new revenue.  That’s one of many reasons conservative Republicans who think the government should have less to spend forcefully reject– in the name of personal freedom– more generous funding, now exceeding $12 billion, for the IRS.

There’s no comparable metric to judge whether the FBI’s budget of nearly $10 billion is appropriate.

Both agencies have been hurt in recent years from all sides as being politicized. Each has slightly greater potential independence as the FBI director is nominated for a ten-year term and the IRS Commissioner can serve five years, giving each the possibility of independence from the White House.  

 My guess is that the IRS will relentlessly chug forward ignoring such attacks and doing the best it can on its well-defined challenging assignments.

The future of the FBI is less clear.  Its responsibilities are more defined by current events and its culture has been shaken if not shattered by the absence of a strong leader like Hoover.