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devoted one-tenth as much coverage to a recent  report finding that tax enforcement spending that Republicans want repealed would reap a huge windfall of overdue and unpaid taxes — averaging $56 billion a year for a decade — as it did to a New York City pilot program spending $53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. 

The latest report, a joint analysis from the IRS and the Treasury Department released February 6, found that the $80 billion infusion would generate $561 billion in extra tax revenue from 2024 to 2034. The additional funds are reportedly helping the IRS reverse a collapse in the audit rates of millionaires and large corporations, narrow a $600 billion annual gap between taxes owed and taxes paid, and reduce the federal budget deficit.

Fox gave the report a total of 5 minutes of airtime over the following week — a single segment during the network’s little-watched Saturday morning block, during which anchor Neil Cavuto said the increased collection of unpaid and overdue taxes was “not good news” and “not welcome news” and warned that the IRS would be “going after more than rich guys.” 

In fact, the IRS is barred by an August 2022 Treasury directive from using the funds “to increase the share of small businesses or households earning less than $400,000 that are audited relative to historical levels,” according to the report.

While Fox personalities are uninterested in or opposed to potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit reduction whose source is wealthy tax cheats, they love to obsess over the purportedly budget-busting implications of relatively tiny amounts of allegedly frivolous spending. They fixated for a decade, for example, on what they portrayed as a federally funded “shrimp on a treadmill” experiment that supposedly cost the government $500,000, $700,000, or $3 million (the actual cost was $47, which the lead researcher paid out of his own pocket for an experiment aimed at measuring the impact of bacterial infections on ocean food supplies). 

Indeed, Fox this month also devoted 55 minutes of coverage across numerous shows to obsessing over New York City’s launch of a $53 million program aiming to provide prepaid credit cards to migrant families seeking asylum in the week after that story broke. The cards are being provided to asylum-seekers who are currently housed in the city’s hotels so they can buy necessities like food and baby supplies. Officials stress that this solution saves the city money because the cards, which operate on the same scale as the state’s SNAP food benefits program, will replace the more costly city-funded food service currently provided by the hotels.

Fox personalities sought to pit citizens against migrants, stressing the budget implications of the payments. 

“Imagine you are a single mom in this country,” co-host Kayleigh McEnany offered during a segment on Outnumbered. “You are working two jobs. You barely have time to see your children. You are desperately trying to afford diapers, to afford formula. … And you look over, ‘Oh wait, if I cross the border illegally, Mayor Eric Adams is going to give me a credit card?’ Give me a break. What an insult to every single hard-working mother in this country, especially those who can't afford to buy diapers for their child.”

“On Saturday, I walked from my house to the New York public library,” co-host Emily Compagno replied. “Along the way, I step over so many homeless New Yorkers. The subway is running late because everything is broken down, and then I get to the library and they say, ‘A reminder: tomorrow we are not open anymore because of budget cuts.' My point is you can’t go five minutes in this city without seeing who actually needs and deserves, children, homeless, so many, and yet somehow here is a $53 million prepaid credit card.”

One way to avoid forcing choices over which babies deserve diapers and food is to fill government coffers by forcing people to pay the taxes they owe and use that money to provide generous, high-quality public services.  

But Fox has repeatedly shown its only true priority is helping Republicans win elections so they can do things like cut taxes for rich people while blaming other groups for the consequences.

Methodology

Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original programming on Fox News Channel for any of the terms “Internal Revenue Service,” “IRS,” “Inflation Reduction Act,” “IRA,” or “Treasury” within close proximity to any of the terms “tax,” “revenue,” “unpaid,” “overdue,” “collect,” “fund,” or “study” or any variation of the term “enforce” from February 6, 2024, when the U.S. Department of Treasury and Internal Revenue Service issued a joint analysis detailing the “high return on investment” on Inflation Reduction Act IRS spending, through the following week, until February 12, 2024.

 

We also search transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original programming on Fox News Channel for any of the terms “asylum,” “New York,” “NYC,” or “Big Apple” or any variation of the terms “migrant,” “migrate,” “immigrant,” “immigrate,” “emigrant,” “emigrate,” or “refugee” within close proximity to any of the terms "53,” “180,” “80,” “credit,” “debit,” “card,” “prepaid,” “pre paid,” “pilot,” “American Express,” “Amex,” or “hotel” from February 2, 2024, when the New York Post broke the story that New York City would provide asylum-seekers with prepaid debit cards, through the following week, until February 8, 2024.

We timed segments, which we defined as instances when the Treasury Department and IRS's analysis or when New York City's prepaid debit card pilot program was the stated topic of discussion or when we found significant discussion of either story. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed either story with one another.

We also timed mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker in a segment on another topic mentioned the Treasury Department and IRS' analysis or New York City's pilot program without another speaker in the segment engaging with the comment, and teasers, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host promoted a segment about the Treasury Department and IRS' analysis or New York City's pilot program scheduled to air later in the broadcast.

We rounded all times to the nearest minute.