Trump’s IRS nominee awaits confirmation as agency churns through 4 acting leaders this year

Since President Donald Trump took office, the Internal Revenue Service has churned through four acting leaders and spiraled into turmoil, while the president’s pick for full-time commissioner waits for a Senate confirmation hearing. Trump announced in early December that he was nominating Republican former Rep. Billy Long to be the next IRS commissioner. The president and his supporters believe Long, who previously sponsored bills to abolish the IRS, can make good use of his strong relationships on Capitol Hill as a Trump ally. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have signaled their opposition by raising questions about Long’s past work promoting a fraud-plagued tax credit, and ethics experts have criticized a flurry of donations he recently received from interests with business before the IRS. Long’s confirmation hearing is expected to happen later this month. But multiple current and former IRS officials, and others in the tax space who regularly deal with the agency, are concerned the slow pace of Long’s confirmation process has left the IRS adrift. “It’s a pivotal moment for the agency. Right now, it’s rudderless,” said Kathy Pakenham, a top tax attorney at Vinson & Elkins who represents clients before the IRS. “For someone new coming in to lead that organization, it’s a five-alarm fire. The people sitting across the table from me are clearly in fear for their jobs, and they don’t know what the future holds.” The Republican-run Senate has not moved quickly to confirm Long, as it has for some of Trump’s other picks, including some controversial Cabinet members. But there’s no indication that the Missouri Republican’s nomination is in peril, and the Treasury Department says it remains a key goal for the administration. “The confirmation of IRS Commissioner is a top priority for the Treasury Department and the Trump Administration,” a Treasury spokeswoman said in a statement. “The confirmation process for nominees is robust, and we are working through the process in a responsible manner and through regular order.” The White House and Long did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment. At the IRS, Trump’s first 100 days saw a series of showdowns between career executives and their new bosses over providing taxpayer data to immigration authorities, an internal power-struggle between competing pro-Trump factions over who would be acting commissioner, a collapse in workers’ morale with mass layoffs looming, and nearly 25% of the staff making plans to quit or retire. To stem the chaos, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently installed his own deputy from the department, Michael Faulkender, as the latest acting IRS commissioner. “Until the IRS commissioner is confirmed, the Secretary tasked me with leading these efforts out of the Treasury front office,” Faulkender said in his first agency-wide email, which he sent last week, according to a copy that was obtained by CNN. Auctioneer, lawmaker, tax adviser Hailing from southwest Missouri, Long spent decades as a small businessman and is perhaps best known for his career as an auctioneer. After leaving Congress, he became a tax adviser. He ran for Congress in 2010, won during the Republican wave, and served in the House until 2023. In Congress, Long has a staunchly conservative record and even proposed eliminating most federal income taxes and shutting down the IRS. “Taxpayers and the wonderful employees of the IRS will love having Billy at the helm,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform announcing Long for the IRS position. “He is the consummate ‘people person,’ well respected on both sides of the aisle.” Long is now working at the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the federal workforce, while waiting for the Senate to act on his IRS nomination, Reuters reported in March. By tapping Long, Trump cut short the five-year statutory term of Danny Werfel, the Biden-appointed and Senate-confirmed former IRS commissioner. Despite hoping he could have stayed on and completed his work, Werfel said he sees some positives to Long. “He has a reputation for being gregarious and likable,” Werfel said. “He could resonate with people who voted for Trump. Maybe there’s an opportunity for him to provide a reset for how people think about the IRS. Maybe he can build a connection between the IRS and members of the public who have historically viewed the IRS through a negative lens.” However, former IRS officials and tax experts warned that if Long is confirmed, he’ll be taking over a highly diminished agency. Donors repay old campaign debts Ethics watchdogs have raised questions about an influx of recent donations to political committees tied to Long from people with business before the IRS. A committee associated with Long’s unsuccessful 2022 bid for the Senate raised nearly $137,000 in the first three months of this year – swamping the roughly $36,000 the committee brought in during the entire 2024 cycle. The donations allowed Long to pay himself back $130,000 in February for a personal loan he had made to his 2022 Senate campaign. The contributions and loan repayments are legal. But Michael Beckel, senior research director of the watchdog group Issue One, says they set off alarms. Beckel said it was “highly unusual” for donors to help repay old campaign debts. “Most people who have outstanding loans from failed political campaigns don’t have people knocking down their doors to give them thousands of dollars,” Beckel said. Some of the money came from people tied to tax-related businesses Long has worked with since leaving Congress. Attempts to directly reach Long were unsuccessful, and officials from OPM and Treasury didn’t answer CNN’s specific questions about the donations. Ties to troubled Covid tax credit Some Democrats have dinged Long’s promotion of the Employee Retention Tax Credit, or ERTC, a Covid-era relief effort that the IRS has flagged for high rates of “improper” claims. The IRS-run program helped small businesses pay employees during the pandemic, but it quickly became a haven for scammers. The billions of dollars of fraudulent claims have created a backlog of legitimate claims – a headache for the next IRS commissioner. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, told Long in a scathing letter earlier this year that “your most significant tax experience has been your recent work promoting a fraud-ridden pandemic-era tax credit.” Neither Long nor the companies he worked with to promote the program have been accused of wrongdoing. After Long left Congress in 2023, he became a certified tax and business adviser and quickly started promoting the ERTC at events and online, telling potential clients that he’d help them get big payments from the IRS in exchange for a portion of what they receive. Long’s critics have seized on his comments from a 2023 podcast in which he said applying for the tax credit was a “no-brainer” because Congress had made the rules so lax that “not everyone” but “virtually everyone qualifies.” In another interview from 2023, Long said Congress “overreacted” when it tweaked the program, “so now everybody qualifies.” His official biography on X still says “DM me to save 40% on your taxes.” Long also said on the podcast that he only helped clients who were legitimately qualified for the tax credits, and would return any fees from clients whose credits were later revoked by the IRS. He said: “If they don’t qualify, we do not tell them they do, and we do not try to get them through the process.” Meanwhile, small businesses that are still waiting for IRS reimbursements are hoping Long’s experience with the program will help him clear out the backlog once he’s at the IRS. The flood of claims has forced companies to wait years for payments. “It’s encouraging to see a nominee like Billy Long with a history of supporting small businesses,” said Noah Kaplan, the CEO of Loyalsnap, a communications platform for fitness studios. “We’re a victim of the fraudulent claims, because of that backlog. We kept our side of the bargain. Legitimate companies should get our funds. We took on risk and kept people on jobs.” Kaplan is one of several business owners who traveled to Washington, DC, in September to urge lawmakers to do more on the ERTC claims. The trip was organized by Justworks, which says the lobbying helped unlock about $50 million in payments from the IRS. Democrats seek an investigation Democrats wary of Long’s ascension to the top job at the IRS also have underscored his financial ties to companies that have sold so-called tribal tax credits as a way to reduce the tax bills of people who buy them. The details of how the tax credits purport to work are opaque, and Arkansas-based oil and gas company White River Energy Corp., a company that has used the credits, says its clients have seen their tax returns approved by the IRS without issue. But Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, and fellow panel member Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat, insist the credits are “fraudulent” because the IRS has informed their staff that “these tax credits do not exist.” The pair recently asked the IRS to investigate the companies promoting them and Masto has said Long’s nomination “should be withdrawn.” Long’s publicly available financial disclosure – prepared as part of the vetting process for his IRS nomination – shows he earned a referral fee of more than $5,000 from White River, which promotes the tribal credit. Wyden and Masto say it’s unclear whether Long played any role in promoting the tribal tax credits but called it “deeply disturbing” that someone with ties to promoters of the tax credits would run the IRS. White River officials did not respond to telephone and email inquiries from CNN. But in the statement posted on the company’s website last month, White River officials say Wyden and Masto had undertaken a “hit-job,” and are engaged in an “attempt to sabotage” Long’s nomination. White River also said it has not received any notification “from any federal government regulatory agency stating that the credits we have been utilizing are not valid or that we do not have the ability to utilize them.” Recent Federal Election Commission filings show four White River employees were among the donors who opened their wallets to support retiring the debt leftover from Long’s 2022 Senate bid. They contributed a combined total of $11,600 in January, several weeks after Trump announced Long’s nomination for the IRS post.