The Washington Post
Americans love to gripe about the Internal Revenue Service that collects our income taxes each year, but we also depend on it to do the job fairly and efficiently, especially the sending out of refunds. And so, for all its rhetoric about the burden of federal taxes, the Trump administration has creatively interpreted a legal exception to the ongoing partial shutdown so as to order 40,000 IRS workers back to their offices in preparation for tax season. Their paychecks will arrive only when this shutdown ends, whenever that might be.
There's a lesson here, beyond the obvious political one that presidents have many ways to soften the impact of shutdowns on the public. The bigger lesson is this: We need government.
Some may see the current furlough of more than 300,000 workers as an opportunity to prove a point about the alleged superfluousness of much of the federal government. Yet the selective reinstatement of the IRS workers tends to prove the opposite point.
Yes, there's waste and incompetence. A surefire way to get more, however, is to demonstrate to America's best and brightest that they would be foolish to work for the government. The message of contempt the shutdown sends to federal workers, and the negative impact it may have on recruitment, could take years to reverse.
Editorial on 01/21/2019