Fox News has been making dystopian predictions about the Inflation Reduction Act since it was passed in 2022. Contrary to the suggestions from Fox, the IRS funding has contributed to a crackdown on big money tax cheats. As Matt Gertz described in 2024:
Fox News is helping the GOP defend the interests of tax cheats as it plays its traditional role of converting fearmongering about immigrants into votes for plutocracy.
The right-wing propaganda network devoted one-tenth as much coverage to a recent report finding that tax enforcement spending that Republicans want repealed would reap a huge windfall of overdue and unpaid taxes — averaging $56 billion a year for a decade — as it did to a New York City pilot program spending $53 million to provide asylum-seekers with prepaid credit cards.
Republicans and their right-wing media allies have fought hard against the $80 billion infusion to the IRS that President Joe Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act provided to go after wealthy tax cheats. Fox played a particularly incendiary role, warning viewers that Biden is turning the IRS into a “new Gestapo” of “armed IRS agents” that would “make sure you obey.” House Republicans, meanwhile, made repeal of the IRA’s funds for the IRS their top priority after taking over in 2023: They passed a full repeal as one of their first bills that January, made a $20 billion cut to the funds their price for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling and avoid global economic calamity in May, and tied military aid to Israel to further cuts in October.
But the overwrought warnings of an impending IRS dystopia haven’t materialized, and experts note that the GOP’s repeal plan increases the federal budget deficit.