That’s interesting, because this is another clear case of total fabrication.

I will skip the $135bn figure, produced by an influence NGO and once again counting paid leave, to focus on the more serious and important alleged $500bn loss from IRS cuts.

Firstly, the statement that “the Internal Revenue Service predicted more than $500 billion in revenue loss due to DOGE-driven cuts” is fraudulent. There was no official IRS prediction of such a loss. The Washington Post reported an anonymous short-term forecast. Its exact wording was:

“Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue.”

So, did this happen? It did not. By April 2025, collections had risen 9.5% year over year to about $850 billion, rather than falling by more than 10%. This came after a roughly 25% reduction in the IRS workforce between January and May 2025. Over the whole of fiscal year 2025, revenue increased by 6%.

Here is a follow-up Washington Post article lamenting that DOGE unfortunately failed to lower tax revenue:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/12/irs-tax-f...

Wouldn’t that make the original claim dishonest, given that it was presented without any meaningful uncertainty? Apparently this distinction is unclear to them.

This entire sequence was absolute bullshit. You can read articles like this with a smile, knowing that they may be completely wrong and that the authors do not care enough about the truth to revisit their claims before basking in their own righteous certainty:

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/happy-tax-evasion-day