Trump-driven IRS turmoil may cost 10 percent of federal revenue, which Fox ignored

In a March 22 story, The Washington Post reported that “staff cuts and disruptions related to the U.S. DOGE Service have officials bracing for a sharp loss of revenue” of up to a 10 percent decrease in federal tax receipts, a shortfall of over $500 billion. From the story:

Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.

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; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.

…

The prediction, officials say, is directly tied to changing taxpayer behavior and President Donald Trump’s rapid demolition of parts of the IRS.

Fox has repeatedly promoted the comparatively meager DOGE savings reportedly totaling $130 billion as of March 28, a figure that reporting makes clear is hugely exaggerated. But according to a Media Matters review, Fox News has not covered this Post story showing a staggering loss in revenue due in part to DOGE. In a review of transcripts on Fox News and Fox Business from March 22 - 27, we found that Fox failed to report on the Post’s exclusive.

However, during this period, Fox Business anchor Liz Claman did acknowledge the importance of the IRS, saying: “I think we do need people at the IRS making sure people pay their taxes, because this country is not gonna run without tax revenue.”

Fox hyped DOGE’s supposed savings

Fox personalities have been eager to applaud DOGE’s efforts to upend much of the United States government, claiming the department is pursuing cost savings and efficiency.

• Fox host Sean Hannity: “There’s $500 billion that was identified by Sen. Rand Paul … in previously approved spending that they believe they have the ability to cut. That's a big number.” Hannity continued, “We're getting into the trillions of dollars which was the goal originally.” [Fox News, Hannity, 3/5/25]
  
• Fox host Jesse Watters celebrated “federal agencies getting DOGEd.” Watters emphasized that the DOGE “whiz kids” are “already saving a billion bucks a day.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 2/4/25]
  
• Fox host Laura Ingraham: “DOGE ends the gravy train.” Ingraham asked, “Are there any sane Democrats left in Washington? Do any of them care about the billions being stolen from the U.S. taxpayers, stolen through waste, stolen through negligence, fraud, abuse?” Ingraham then celebrated an announcement of 167 contract cancellations. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 2/14/25]
  
• Fox & Friends hosts gushed over the supposed DOGE savings and supported a DOGE “dividend check” to Americans. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 2/20/25]
  
• Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo celebrated that “DOGE has exposed so much wasteful spending” before suggesting “digging into Medicare and Medicaid.” [Fox Business, Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, 3/10/25]

Reports have shown DOGE’s savings are exaggerated

• PBS’ News Hour: DOGE “has posted what it calls a wall of receipts on its Web site that claims it has saved billions by cutting certain federal contracts. But reports and government documents prove that many of these so-called savings are either misleading or incorrect.” PBS White House correspondent Laura Barrón-López explained: “As The New York Times first reported, five of DOGE's biggest contracts that they say have resulted in savings ended up being deleted from that wall of receipts after outlets pointed out that there were errors. And some of the biggest errors in savings are, as CBS first reported, a USAID contract for $650 million that was listed three times, as The Intercept first reported, a Social Security contract listed as $232 million, instead of $560,000, and an ICE contract that DOGE listed as $8 billion, when, in reality, it was $8 million.” [PBS, News Hour, 2/26/25]

• AP: “Nearly 40% of the federal contracts that President Donald Trump’s administration claims to have canceled as part of its signature cost-cutting program aren’t expected to save the government any money.” A February analysis by The Associated Press found that “more than one-third of the contract cancellations, 794 in all, are expected to yield no savings.” [The Associated Press, 2/25/25]

• Gizmodo: “DOGE Just Keeps Deleting Its ‘Savings.’” Gizmodo reported on March 3 that DOGE “has repeatedly had to pull examples of so-called savings down after it was revealed that it actually didn’t save taxpayers anything.” According to the article, DOGE “changed or removed more than 40% of the more than 1,000 contracts it claimed to have canceled over the previous week, according to the New York Times. Included in that overnight alteration was the outright removal of five of the seven largest contracts it claimed to have cut.” [Gizmodo, 3/3/25]

• NY Times: DOGE removed identifying information from its website to make its claimed savings harder to fact-check, before reversing course. The New York Times reported that DOGE “began making its new mistakes harder to find” following news outlets’ reporting on the group’s “error-filled data that inflated its success at saving taxpayer money.” The Times reported that DOGE began posting claims of new cuts without identifying information, and that it later removed the identifying information from the publicly available source code, making its claims nearly impossible to verify. The Times reported in a later story that DOGE “added some of the missing details,” allowing the public to check its claims of savings again. [The New York Times, 3/13/25, 3/18/25]

Fox has long demagogued against the IRS

• Fox pushed a lie about increased IRS funding in the Inflation Reduction Act hundreds of times. In August 2022, Fox promoted the false claim that the IRA added 87,000 employees to the IRS at least 203 times, and House Republicans used these lies to justify a push to cut billions in enforcement funding from the agency. Some of the funding was successfully used to collect taxes owed by the richest Americans who otherwise may not have paid what they owed. [Media Matters, 6/7/24]

• Fox also pushed unhinged demagoguery about the extra IRS funding, claiming that it would fund a militia to “hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers.” Then-Fox host Tucker Carlson claimed, “They're hiring another 87,000 armed IRS agents just to make sure that you obey. Got it?” Others on Fox described the potential wave of IRS hiring as an “economic, financial militia against regular people” deployed by those who “want to control you”; a “new army”; a “new Gestapo” Biden will use in an “abusive, corrupt manner”; “a Praetorian Guard that will be unleashed again” to “grab all the cash they can by any means necessary”; and “part of an orchestrated campaign to target Americans and have the federal government be at war with those Americans.” [Media Matters, 8/16/22]

• During the Obama administration, Fox manufactured a scandal over the IRS scrutinizing political nonprofits. Before it came out that the IRS had also investigated progressive-aligned nonprofit organizations, Fox worked in concert with Republican politicians in an attempt to manufacture a scandal about the IRS supposedly targeting conservative nonprofits. [Media Matters, 8/20/13]

Methodology

Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original programming on Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network for either of the terms “IRS” or “Internal Revenue Service” from March 22, 2025, when The Washington Post published its exclusive reporting that tax revenues could drop by 10% compared to 2024, through March 27, 2025.We timed segments, which we defined as instances when the possible IRS revenue shortfall was the stated topic of discussion or when we found significant discussion of the possible shortfall. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed the possible shortfall with one another.We did not time passing mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker in a segment on another topic mentioned the possible IRS shortfall without another speaker engaging with the comment, or teasers, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host promoted a segment about the possible shortfall scheduled to air later in the broadcast.We rounded all times to the nearest minute.

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