The congressional workload increases, even while the legislative body is not in session

Congress is on its second week of spring break. But its workload is piling up like drifts of cherry blossom petals. To get a rundown the latest Hill news, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with WTOP Capitol Hill Correspondent Mitchell Miller.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin Let’s talk about the IRS because that’s occupying Capitol Hill when it is in session. And now there’s some news coming out of that agency on their $80 billion windfall.

Mitchell Miller Right. A lot of people probably thinking about this with their taxes coming due themselves. And right now, the IRS is trying to outline to Congress what it is going to do with all this new money that has been approved. Republicans, as you know, have been very skeptical of a lot of the initiatives that the IRS has talked about. But late last week, the IRS’ new Commissioner, Danny Werfel, and other IRS officials outlined some of their key goals, and one of them includes getting rid of its paper backlog within the next five years. We’ll see if that happens. But that’s the goal of eventually going to fully digital correspondence with taxpayers. And also for IRS employees, new data management systems are trying to be developed to help process all that taxpayer information, as well as the hiring of lawyers and accountants to help deal with all these complicated audits that they’re talking about. Congressional Republicans have complained that the IRS will carry out a new wave of audits that could actually hit a lot of average Americans. But the Biden administration and Democrats have pushed back on that, saying that this will not affect households that report under $400,000 in income. And also, Democrats say the overall investment will bring in hundreds of billions of dollars for the agency that it currently misses now in connection with these audits that they say will be aimed primarily at wealthy people, corporations and those that are trying to get around the IRS guidelines. GOP lawmakers, however, are still skeptical. So you can expect lawmakers to press the IRS for more details on how all these plans are going to be carried out and how all that money is going to be spent.

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Tom Temin Yeah. So for Danny Werfel, it won’t simply be smooth sailing with the billions — well, it’s not $80 billion in one year — but the billions per year. It’s not going to be just take the money and run with it.

Mitchell Miller Absolutely not. And the IRS has a lot to do in addition to all these IT issues and basically changing a lot of the internal operations of the agency. They’re planning to hire more than 10,000 people before the end of this fiscal year. So that’s a huge part of this. And then for people that are just wondering how this will affect me, the agency is already in the midst of hiring 5,000 phone assisters, as they’re called. The agency now answers, it estimates, 80% to 90% of the calls that are coming in. That compares to under 20% during the pandemic. A lot of people will remember being totally frustrated about trying to even get a hold of any human being during that whole period during the pandemic. So the IRS is pointing to that as one of the areas of improvement that people can actually tangibly deal with.

Tom Temin Right. You can get the phone answered. The question is, can you get an answer on the phone?

Mitchell Miller Right, exactly. And that goes back to some of that data management that I was talking about. What they want to do is essentially give some of these IRS officials what they call a 360 point of view that really has all of the information for an individual taxpayer so that the taxpayer doesn’t finally get through with a call and ask the question, and then, of course, the question can’t get answered. And of course, also some of those accountants and the lawyers, it’s hoped, at least within the IRS, will be able to help some of these more complicated audits be carried out.

Tom Temin And the other, let’s call it irritating agency, the Office of Personnel Management, that’s in some crosshairs in the Senate.

Mitchell Miller Right. The members of the Senate are concerned that OPM is just not moving fast enough to deal with a growing number of federal workers and their retirement applications. Like the IRS, a lot of it is still centered around paper, rather than being digitized. One in three federal workers are eligible to retire this year. So, of course, this is a big deal. And as Federal News Network has reported, it now takes more than 80 days to process a retirement claim. That’s well over the OPM’s own goal of 60 days. It’s been known to take even a year for some people to actually get through all of their retirement, procedural and paperwork type of things. The House Oversight Committee has also been pressing the agency on this, these issues. They want to know more about what OPM is doing to handle its increased caseload and improve its review process. So OPM getting it from both sides, Senate and House. A lot of scrutiny there from lawmakers.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Mitchell Miller, Capitol Hill correspondent for WTOP. I love that, 80 days. Wasn’t there a movie around the world in 80 days in a balloon?

Mitchell Miller People probably feel like they’re going around the world a few more times in 80 days with this.

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Tom Temin And of course, when they do return next week, the budget has got to start looming large at some point.

Mitchell Miller Right. And you know, it’s interesting because everybody says, well, we have time. It’s not going to be a problem. But as we both know, this calendar moves very, very quickly, and Congress, still out, will get here roughly in mid April. There will be some spinning of the wheels again. And before you know it, we’re going to be in late spring and early summer. And early summer, of course, is when there’s a lot of concern or at least later in the summer, there’s a lot of concern about the debt ceiling. Now, there have been a lot of hearings held thus far in connection with the budget. We’ve seen a lot of people, whether it’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen or others, appearing before the committee. So they have started the process. Now, of course, the House, as we’ve talked about in the past, now has new leadership. And Republicans really want to get back to regular order. So they’re trying to get things through the committees. Obviously, that takes a lot more time than if you just try to pile everything up at the very end and put it all into an omnibus. But there is starting to be a murmur of concern about, okay, there’s a back and forth here and yes, there is some time, but Democrats are trying to put more heat and you’re going to see that in the coming weeks on Republicans to come up with some kind of at least tentative framework of the cuts that they’re talking about, because they say they’re just not going to move ahead on the debt ceiling unless they see some of these reductions. And what they see is just vast overspending by the federal government.

Tom Temin Yes. So there’s some real brinksmanship that’s going to happen with respect to that debt ceiling. And the summer could be very hot indeed.

Mitchell Miller No question about it. And of course, federal workers will be part of the arguments going back and forth. A lot of these agencies, the House Republicans have pinpointed them for reductions. They want the budgets to come down. And on the other hand, you still have the issues of not touching the third rail, of course, of Medicare and Social Security. So it’s going to be really interesting to see when this jockeying really gets underway this summer, where some of these cuts, if any, are going to occur.

Tom Temin And let me ask you this. There was a lot of hullabaloo a couple of weeks ago before they went on recess about TikTok and the RESTRICT act, which would go way beyond banning TikTok. But it seems like the ardor has sort of cooled a little bit for some of those measures.

Mitchell Miller It has. I’ve been on calls with Virginia Senator Mark Warner. I’ve talked to him about the RESTRICT Act, which he is the lead sponsor of. At one point, as you alluded to a few weeks ago, he was saying, well, I think with the bipartisan support he has in the Senate and he does have significant bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats, that it could start to get moving. And also the White House has significantly backed it. But we have seen those wheels start to grind a bit. This would be a proposal that would empower the commerce secretary to take action that could ban, effectively, technology like TikTok due to unacceptable risk to national security. Now, Warner points out it would not just single out TikTok; it would be potentially broader to many other technology platforms. However, that also complicates it. This is such a very, very difficult type of legislation to get through Congress. Also, you now have progressive members in the House, from fellow Democrats of Warner who have come out in opposition to it, saying that this is a First Amendment issue, that it really would shut down a lot of the ways that people are making money now on TikTok. Among them, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been one of the real vocal people in opposition to this. And then on the other side, on the Republican side, they have actually pushed through the Data Act, through the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this year. That would compel the President to impose sanctions on Chinese companies if they expose Americans’ private data to foreign adversaries. Of course, again, in the target would be TikTok. So you have all these moving parts. And you’re right, I think that this has really slowed down. There was a lot of talk about this when we had the testimony from the parent company of TikTok on Capitol Hill a few weeks ago. But now I think it’s really going to slow down as we get into the summer because it is such a difficult issue to address.

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