The National Treasury Employees Union’s new president wants Congress to get serious about avoiding a government shutdown and funding the Internal Revenue Service

Tony Reardon, NTEU’s former national executive vice president, took over as president for 16-year veteran Colleen Kelley on Aug 13.  He told the Federal Drive with Tom Temin that one of his first short-term goals will be to convince Congress to avoid a government shutdown.

“We’re very focused on what the impact of that would be on our on our members, and frankly, we are hopeful and working very hard towards making sure that these agencies are provided adequate funding,” Reardon said.

Another NTEU priority, he said, is working to restore funding for the IRS. Since 2010, the agency has lost 18,000 employees.

“The IRS has taken huge hits in its funding, to the tune of about $1.2 billion in the last five years,” Reardon said. “It just cannot continue to function and do what the American people need it to do, and collect the revenue that this country needs it to collect, if it continues to be shortchanged in terms of its funding. When you think about the importance of a certain element of a business, if it was your sales force, and you decided that you weren’t going to pay any attention to it and weren’t going to fund it, your business would fail.”

NTEU represents 150,00 federal employees and a large majority of IRS employees.

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