IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, before Congress on June 23, 2014 (Win McNamee/Getty)
It's not just the growth of government that troubles Victor Davis Hanson. It's
the creation of a partisan, semi-autonomous government that seems to exist for the benefit of its employees and the larger ideological agenda of the present administration.
Sometimes contemporary government bureaucracies are even more blatantly enlisted in the progressive cause of seeing liberal Democrats elected. The Internal Revenue Service has enormous carrot-and-stick power in picking and choosing who needs a tax audit, or which group deserves tax-exempt status. Under Lois Lerner, the IRS’s tax-exemption division targeted conservative groups to defang them before the 2012 election — and then attempted to cover up that perversion of the agency. Lerner herself pled the Fifth Amendment, and now we learn that much of her key e-mail correspondence mysteriously disappeared from her computer. E-mail records from six other IRS officials of interest likewise vanished. The IRS also improperly handed over tax files of particular groups to the FBI for investigation. It is no exaggeration to state that the IRS has now surrendered its reputation as an impartial agency and lost the public trust. It has degenerated into an extension of the White House.
Hanson goes on in his usual brilliance to analyze what is happening at other federal agencies, such as the Border Patrol, the Affordable Care Act, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the General Services Administration, NASA, the V.A., and the EPA. Please read the whole thing here.
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