Senate Democrats raise concerns about IRS readiness for tax filing season
A sign is displayed outside of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Building on June 7, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Heading into the new year, Senate Democrats are raising concerns about the Internal Revenue Service’s ability to handle the upcoming tax filing season, amid changes in leadership and to the workforce in the first year of the Trump administration.
In a letter to Treasury Secretary and acting IRS Commissioner Scott Bessent obtained first by ABC News, the group of 17 senators, led by Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, wrote that they have “serious concerns” the IRS is “not prepared” for the next tax season, and that taxpayers “may face delays and difficulties in filing returns and receiving refunds.”
The Trump administration has conducted large-scale layoffs and voluntary buyouts — some of which have been reversed — at the IRS, which is also responsible this year for implementing new changes to the tax code following the passage of Republicans’ major tax and domestic policy bill.
Bessent has served as acting IRS commissioner since August after President Donald Trump removed Billy Long, a former GOP congressman, from the role two months after he was confirmed by the Senate and nominated Long to become the U.S. ambassador to Iceland.
Bessent became the seventh official to lead the agency in 2025, following Long and a string of other senior officials.
The law made permanent the 2017 GOP tax cuts, while boosting funding for border security and the Defense Department, scaling back some social safety net programs, and limiting taxes on tips and overtime for some workers.
In a statement to ABC News, Warren accused the Trump administration of enacting changes that will benefit wealthy Americans and make it harder for other Americans seeking help from the agency.
“Donald Trump’s endless attacks on the IRS are good news for his billionaire buddies and giant tax prep companies, but bad news for Americans getting ready for filing season. Americans rely on the IRS to file their taxes and get their tax refunds quickly and easily, and I’m pressing for answers,” she wrote.
The Democrats also cited a September report from the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration on the previous filing season.
While the watchdog called the 2025 filing season “successful” and found that the agency processed more tax returns compared to the same time period in the previous year, it also found that the Trump administration’s workforce reductions “had no significant impact” on the 2025 filing season — but that they could “impact key processing programs and customer service going forward.”
According to the inspector general’s office, the staffing losses on customer service and anti-fraud teams could lead to the agency processing fewer returns, assisting fewer taxpayers, and failing to prevent $360 million in fraudulent refunds from being paid out.
The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to questions from ABC News about the inspector general’s report and the concerns raised by Democrats.
(NEW YORK) — The No. 2 official in the Justice Department told ABC News in an interview Friday that there has been “no effort” to redact President Donald Trump’s name from the release of files stemming from federal investigations into convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was asked Friday in an interview by ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas whether every document that mentions Trump will be released as the government continues its rollout of hundreds of thousands of files in the coming weeks.
“Assuming it’s consistent with the law, yes,” Blanche said. “So there’s no effort to hold anything back because there’s the name Donald J. Trump or anybody else’s name, Bill Clinton’s name, Reid Hoffman’s name. There’s no effort to hold back or not hold back because of that and — and so — but again, we’re not, we’re not redacting the names of famous men and women that are associated with Epstein.”
When directly pressed over whether there’s been any order to DOJ personnel to redact materials involving Trump, Blanche rejected any such suggestion and accused Democratic lawmakers of using selective disclosures from Epstein’s estate to present Trump in a negative light.
“President Trump has certainly said from the beginning that he expects all files that can be released to be released and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Blanche said.
Blanche sat for the interview just hours before the department released its first tranche of thousands of files, which contained little information related to Trump and instead included images of former President Bill Clinton without context, which were highlighted on social media by DOJ and White House officials.
A spokesperson for Clinton accused the department of selectively disclosing the pictures in a statement and denied that they showed any wrongdoing by the former president.
“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday only to protect Bill Clinton,” Clinton’s spokesperson Angel Urena said Friday. “They can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton.”
“Everyone, especially MAGA, expects answers, not scapegoats,” the spokesperson said.
In the ABC News interview, Blanche further sought to defend the department’s decision not to release the entirety of its files subject to disclosure under the bill signed into law by Trump, which gave the Justice Department a 30-day deadline to release the entirety of its Epstein investigative files.
“I did not say that all the files will not be released, I said all the files will not be released today,” Blanche said when asked about an interview he gave earlier Friday to Fox News. “And the law is very specific that the Department of Justice is required to make sure that we protect victims. And as recently as Wednesday, we learned of additional victim names, and so we’ve received over 1,200 names of victims and their family members since we started this process. And so there’s an established precedent that in a situation like this, where it’s in essence impossible for us to comply with the law today, that we comply with the law, consistent with the law.”
When asked whether the public should be confident that Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal defense attorney, would act in the public’s interest over Trump, Blanche said the American people should look at what the department ultimately releases.
“Your confidence should be in the fact that for decades, lots of people have been trying to go after President Trump falsely, and when it came to the Epstein saga, it’s exactly the same story.”
Blanche added that the process to make redactions to the documents, “was not Attorney General [Pam] Bondi, [FBI] Director Patel, Todd Blanche going through and coding millions of documents and saying, ‘yes, no, yes, no.’ You have multiple, dozens and dozens of the most highly trained lawyers in the Department of Justice working for the National Security Division. These are career lawyers engaged in this process.”
Blanche defends prison transfer of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell
In the interview, Blanche also defended the department’s controversial move over the summer to transfer Epstein’s convicted associate Ghislaine Maxwell to a lower security prison facility just days after he sat for an interview with her over two days in Florida.
In an interview released by Vanity Fair earlier this week, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles denied that Trump was involved in the decision and said he disapproved of Maxwell’s transfer.
While Blanche said he was “not permitted” to talk about security for individual inmates, he said Maxwell was facing “multiple threats” that warranted her being moved to a separate low-security facility in Texas.
“At the time that she was moved, there were multiple threats against her life, and like happens all the time at the Bureau of Prisons when that happens, one of the things that one of the options available to the warden and the security system within the Bureau of Prisons is to move the inmate,” Blanche said. “She’s not released. She’s in federal prison.”
Blanche further denied Maxwell was receiving any preferential treatment in the new facility, despite recent whistleblower disclosures released by congressional Democrats.
Blanche says investigations into Comey, James will continue
ABC News separately asked Blanche whether the department plans to continue pursuing prosecutions against two of Trump’s top political targets, New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey after a federal judge tossed their indictments in November on the basis that a Trump-installed prosecutor was unlawfully appointed.
Two separate federal grand juries in the past two weeks have rejected the department’s efforts to re-indict James on mortgage fraud charges and a separate federal judge in Washington, D.C., has restricted prosecutors from accessing key evidence in their probe of Comey.
Blanche confirmed the department’s investigation into Comey “is continuing” and said it was “not a mystery” that DOJ plans to still seek charges against him and rejected any suggestion the prosecution was “vindictive.”
James and Comey have denied all wrongdoing.
When asked about the interview that Wiles, the White House chief of staff, gave to Vanity Fair in which she candidly appeared to concede the DOJ’s prosecution of James was “retribution,” Blanche again defended the department’s actions.
“Because we’re looking at the evidence, we’re investigating them, investigating the cases. We have law enforcement, career law enforcement, doing the investigations are being presented to a grand jury in the normal course,” Blanche said.
ABC News has previously reported that career prosecutors on both the James and Comey investigations recommended prosecutors not pursue either indictment based on what they considered the lack of sufficient evidence to secure a conviction.
(WASHINGTON) — With almost a year as vice president — and one year until the midterm elections, JD Vance’s supporters say he is settling into his role in the Trump administration, being used as the president’s “fixer” and “enforcer,” a source familiar with their relationship told ABC News.
“Vance really has been an enforcer and fixer for the president and his administration, and he’s been able to do it on a wide variety of topics,” the source, someone familiar with the relationship between Vance and Trump, said. “Unlike past vice presidents who demanded a specific policy portfolio, Vance never did that, which allows the president to put JD in the game whenever he sees a need for him to be put in the game.”
This has allowed Trump to dispatch Vance to advance his agenda, the source said.
“I think that dynamic has benefited the president, the vice president and the entire administration,” the source added, saying trust between the two — and others in the administration with whom Vance has forged relationships for years — has led to Vance’s role.
Vance’s role in the Trump White House has sharpened as the 2026 midterm elections approach and his name has been floated as a possible 2028 presidential candidate — even by Trump himself.
Proponents of Vance say his role as the “enforcer” and “fixer” was on display last summer as the White House worked to push Trump’s massive tax and spending bill through Congress.
In the days leading up to the bill’s passage, Vance — who served as a senator from Ohio before becoming vice president — held a series of meetings with conservative and moderate holdouts and with Senate leadership to help move the bill forward.
“He was a big part of getting it across the finish line and then promoting it afterwards,” a former White House official told ABC News about Trump’s megabill.
When asked by ABC News how they view Vance’s role in the administration, White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said in a statement that Vance is Trump’s “trusted partner” who has helped deliver on Trump’s agenda.
“Vice President Vance is a trusted partner to President Trump and has played a critical role in helping the President keep all of the promises he made to the American people including delivering the largest tax cut in history for middle and working class Americans, securing the border, and putting American workers first,” Huston said.
Vance also took the lead in facilitating the TikTok framework that would transfer majority ownership of the app to Americans, but the deal has not been fully solidified. Vance was heavily involved in developing a strategy to reach the TikTok framework leading up to the U.S.-China summit in Madrid, where officials discussed the matter and joined Trump in the Oval Office when he signed the executive order on the framework.
A critical moment for Vance during this past year was his angry exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office where he chastised the world leader for not being thankful for the support the U.S. has provided to Ukraine in its war against Russia.
“Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media,” Vance said to Zelenskyy in February. “Right now, you guys are going around enforcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.”
The eyebrow-raising exchange underscored Vance’s willingness to publicly defend Trump and the lengths he would go to do so. But Trump appeared to shut down Vance in the meeting: “But you see, I think it’s good for the American people to see what’s going on. I think it’s very important,” Trump said.
Vance and Trump have not always been aligned. In March of this past year, Vance showed a rare instance of appearing to break with Trump in a Signal group chat with other top US officials and questioned whether the president recognized that a unilateral U.S. attack on the Houthis to keep international shipping lanes open was at odds with his tough talk about European nations paying their share of such efforts.
Still, Vance’s skills as a communicator have been useful for the administration — especially during the ongoing government shutdown, the former White House officials said.
“I would say one thing there that sort of ties to where he’s been in general as a help in the administration, is that he’s a very good communicator, and like you saw when he took the podium at the beginning of the shutdown to talk about, you know, the White House’s position on it,” the official said.
Joel Goldstein, a vice-presidential scholar and former professor at Saint Louis University Law School, told ABC News that Vance follows the footprint of vice presidents as an administration spokesperson — but takes it even further.
“Vice presidents are generally spokespersons for the administration they serve, but Vice President Vance seems unusually active in this regard, including on social media, and more confrontational than most recent vice presidents in some of his rhetoric against political opponents and the discourse he uses or doesn’t rebuke,” Goldstein said. “He has also performed in visible diplomatic roles as have his predecessors, but has often been more confrontational towards traditional allies as he was at the Munich Security Summit and in the Oval Office meeting with Zelenskyy.”
Republican political operatives said Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference was a breakout moment as vice president.
In February, Vance delivered a stinging message to European allies, saying that the biggest threat to Europe did not come from Russia or China, but from within Europe itself, and that he was concerned Europe was moving toward censorship and away from democracy.
Vance added another title under his portfolio when he became the Republican National Committee finance chair, a key fundraising role in the organization and the first time a sitting vice president has held the position.
In a statement to ABC News, RNC press secretary Kiersten Pels said that Vance will be critical for the national party heading into next year’s midterms — calling Vance a “fundraising powerhouse for the RNC.”
Vance has also been involved in trying to maintain Republicans’ slim majority in the House ahead of next year’s midterm elections. In August, Vance traveled to Indiana, where he made the pitch to Republican lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional map.
With a year until the midterm election, a source close to the vice president said Vance will be involved.
“I think you can probably expect, as we get closer to midterms, for the vice president to be a regular presence on the campaign trail for Trump-endorsed candidates across the country,” the source said.
Next year’s election will also be critical for Vance as he’s viewed as a possible 2028 candidate and someone who could take on the mantle of leading the MAGA movement once Trump leaves office.
In a recent interview with Pod Force One, Vance shared that during a private lunch at the White House six months ago, Trump floated the idea of him and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the Republican ticket in 2028.
“It feels so premature, because we’re still so early. And what I always say to people is, if we take care of business, the politics will take care of itself,” Vance said to podcast host Miranda Devine.
Trump himself recently said Vance and Rubio would be “great” options as 2028 presidential candidates.
“I’m not sure if anybody would run against those two,” Trump said on Oct. 27 of Vance and Rubio. “I think if they ever formed a group it would be unstoppable.”
Carl Juste/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric in a speech on Tuesday night, repeatedly attacking Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar and complaining about immigration outside of Europe.
“Let’s have a few from from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people. Do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships,” Trump said as he addressed supporters in Pennsylvania.
The speech was billed as an event to sell his economic agenda, but quickly devolved into a campaign-style speech filled with derogatory insults.
Trump specifically took aim at Omar, a Somali American who represents Minnesota. He appeared to purposefully mispronounce her name and referred to Omar’s hijab as a turban.
“I love her, she comes in, does nothing but b—-. She’s always complaining. She comes from a country where, I mean, it’s considered about the worst country in the world, right?” Trump said.
“She should get the hell out. Throw her the hell out,” Trump added.
His supporters then launched into “send her back” chants about the congresswoman, who is an American citizen.
Omar responded to the remarks, the latest in Trump’s attacks on her and Somali immigrants, in a post on X late Tuesday.
“Trump’s obsession with me is beyond weird. He needs serious help. Since he has no economic policies to tout, he’s resorting to regurgitating bigoted lies instead. He continues to be a national embarrassment,” she wrote.
Trump admits to saying ‘s—hole countries’
Trump on Tuesday also recalled a 2018 meeting in which he told a group of senators behind closed doors that the U.S. shouldn’t accept immigrants from “s—hole countries” such as Haiti.
When it was reported at the time, Trump himself flatly denied using the expletive.
“Never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor troubled country,” Trump wrote on X, then known as Twitter.
ABC News reported that in the 2018 Oval Office meeting with senators, Trump expressed frustration over the visa lottery program and asked those in the room why they would want people from Haiti, Africa and other “s—hole countries” coming into the United States.”
In his denial then, Trump accused Democrats in the meeting of making up comments attributed to him and said that he “probably should record future meetings.” Notably, the president back then did not deny he suggested that America should admit more immigrants from places such as Norway — comments that were confirmed by multiple sources with direct knowledge of the conversations.
But in his speech on Tuesday, Trump embraced the expletive as he boasted about pausing immigration applications from what he called “third-world countries” including “hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries.”
Someone in the audience then yelled the word “s—hole.”
“I didn’t say ‘s—hole,’ you did,” Trump quipped. “Remember, I said that to the senators. They came in, the Democrats, they wanted to be bipartisan, so they came in and they said, ‘This is totally off the record, nothing mentioned here, we want to be honest,’ because our country was going to hell.”
“And we had a meeting, and I say, ‘Why is it we only take people from s—hole countries,’ right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden? Just a few? Let’s have a few from from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people. Do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”
ABC News’ Justin Gomez and Alexandra Hutzler contributed to this report.
