Wyden Statement on Trump Weaponizing IRS and Violating Taxpayer Privacy Laws
Washington, D.C. — Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., issued the following statement today on new reports that the Trump administration and Elon Musk are attempting to violate taxpayer privacy laws to sweep up the records of millions of immigrant taxpayers and accelerate the administration’s abuse of IRS data.
“What Trump and Musk’s henchmen are doing by weaponizing taxpayer data is illegal, this abuse of the immigrant community is a moral atrocity, and you’d be a fool to think Trump won’t go after others he dislikes, including American citizens. Even though the Trump administration claims it’s focused on undocumented immigrants, it’s obvious that they do not care when they make mistakes and ruin the lives of legal residents and American citizens in the process. A repressive scheme on the scale of what they’re talking about at the IRS would lead to hundreds if not thousands of those horrific mistakes, and the people who are disappeared as a result may never be returned to their families.
“Trump’s sycophants and the DOGE boys may be a lost cause, but IRS personnel need to think long and hard about whether they want to be a part of an effort to round up innocent people and send them to be locked away in foreign torture prisons.
“I’m sure Trump has promised pardons to the people who will commit crimes in the process of abusing legally-protected taxpayer data, but violations of taxpayer privacy laws carry hefty civil penalties too, and Trump cannot pardon anybody out from under those. I’m going to demand answers from the acting IRS commissioner immediately about this outrageous abuse of the agency.”
###
Next Article Previous Article