Recently, pollsters have made a point to ask respondents about their view of Elon Musk. His favorability consistently trails that of Donald Trump, thanks to a deluge of negative reporting on the US DOGE Service and its forced transparency on the swamp. But when voters hear about DOGE's next target, Musk may get a whole lot more popular.

The New York Times reports this morning that the US DOGE Service has arrived at the IRS to start deconstructing the "waste, fraud, and abuse" that Democrats have promised to end for decades. Musk now will take aim at it instead -- and there won't be a thing that Democrats or bureaucrats will be able to do about it in the long run, either:

“Waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said. “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.”

Mr. Fields added: “DOGE will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover as the American people deserve to know what their government has been spending their hard-earned tax dollars on.”

The examination of the I.R.S. system represents the latest move by members of Mr. Musk’s team to push the boundaries of access to government data beyond what is typical for political appointees. The Treasury Department has faced questions in recent weeks after lieutenants of Mr. Musk who were assigned to the agency started scrutinizing the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s system, which directs payments across the federal government.

Gavin Kliger, a young software engineer who was brought into the Office of Personnel Management as part of the DOGE effort, worked at I.R.S. headquarters on Thursday, according to two people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly. He will be assigned to the I.R.S. as a senior adviser to the acting commissioner. The tax agency is still working out the exact terms of his work at the I.R.S., though he is expected to have broad access to its systems, according to the two people.

This will likely get furious pushback in both the mainstream media and in the courts, at least initially. It will get framed as a data-security issue over taxpayers' personal records, as the Wall Street Journal has already made clear: 

The IRS has an extraordinary amount of taxpayer information, both for households and businesses. For example, the agency has said that taxpayers filed 213.3 million returns and other forms electronically with the agency in 2023.  

If Musk’s team were to gain access to the IRS’s systems, it could allow them to view a variety of sensitive data. Files in the Integrated Data Retrieval System, for instance, reveal individual taxpayer identification numbers and tax preparers’ identification numbers. 

That argument will not likely land, either politically or legally. Politically, taxpayers already know that massive numbers of bureaucrats already have access to their data, including "twenty-somethings" who already work at the IRS and other agencies. Having a handful of data scientists look at the financial records at the IRS is not exactly new, since the IRS does this kind of analysis already to detect money laundering and other kinds of fraud.

Besides, taxpayers also watched as these bureaucrats leaked the records of The Wrong Wealthy People to ProPublica for political purposes. The argument that the IRS and its workers treat this data as sacrosanct is laughable on its face. 

Legally, the argument is even weaker. Democrats built the mechanism by which Musk and Trump with the express purpose of revamping data systems throughout the federal government. Trump has used that authority to open up spending decisions to public scrutiny, and his own executive authority to hire Musk as an advisor and his team as legit federal employees. Barack Obama and Joe Biden even made it easier by making the head of USDS a political appointment and by waiving the usual red tape in the hiring process to get the Silicon Valley "twenty-somethings" in place. 

And for that matter, where was all this concern when Biden began to hire 87,000 'civilians' and grant them access to taxpayer information for the explicit purpose of auditing them? Why is that less of a problem than hiring a few dozen people to audit the thousands of bureaucrats at the IRS, or any other federal agency?

This effort may go beyond an audit, although that won't involve Musk. Trump is now talking about eliminating the IRS and the federal income tax altogether, making up the income through massive DOGE savings and tariffs collected directly on imports. That probably won't be enough to make up the $2.1 trillion per annum received by the IRS from taxpayers, but it might be enough to force more spending cuts on Congress, out of sheer necessity.

Those would not be the only savings either, as Glenn Reynolds wrote last night:

One of the most immediate benefits for individual taxpayers would be the elimination of time spent on tax-related activities. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) estimates that the average individual taxpayer spends approximately 13 hours per year preparing and filing their federal income tax return, according to the IRS Paperwork Reduction Act compliance estimates for Form 1040 (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf). This figure includes gathering records, completing forms, and ensuring compliance with tax laws. For the roughly 150 million individual tax returns filed annually, this translates to nearly 2 billion hours collectively spent on tax preparation.

If personal income tax were eliminated, this time could be redirected to more productive or personally fulfilling activities. For example, a taxpayer earning the median U.S. hourly wage of approximately $30 (as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm) could effectively "save" $390 worth of time annually (13 hours × $30/hour). For higher earners or those with more complex tax situations—such as self-employed individuals or those with investment income—the time savings could be even greater, often exceeding 20–30 hours per year due to additional forms and schedules. ...

The savings in time, effort, and expense would have ripple effects beyond individual taxpayers. For instance, the reduction in administrative burden could boost productivity, as individuals redirect their time and energy toward work or entrepreneurial pursuits. A study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University suggests that simplifying tax compliance could increase GDP by up to 1% annually by reducing deadweight losses associated with tax administration (https://www.mercatus.org/publications/economic-growth/cost-tax-compliance).

Be sure to read this lengthy and detailed analysis in full. Perhaps this would work, financially as well as politically. But we won't know until we get a good look at how IRS handles its revenues, its own spending, and who benefits most from the latter especially. If Musk's DOGE work lays out a clear path to dismantle the IRS, he might become the most popular figure of any administration since the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment. 

Update: As a reader and pal reminded me by e-mail, we didn't hear much about the sacrosanct nature of taxpayer records from these same critics when Trump's tax records got leaked to MSNBC, either.