Trump’s ‘Not Happy’ with the Border Deal — but He May Sign It Anyway

Plus, shocking numbers from the IRS

Trump’s ‘Not Happy’ with the Border Deal. Why He’ll Probably Sign It Anyway.

Will he or won’t he?

After House and Senate negotiators reached a tentative agreement Monday night on a bipartisan border security deal, the looming question is whether President Trump will veto the deal, potentially sending the government toward another partial shutdown at the end of the week.

What’s in the deal: The text of the legislation wasn’t yet available, but the agreement reportedly would provide money for the unfunded portions of the government through the end of the fiscal year in September. It would increase spending by the Department of Homeland Security by $1.7 billion and provide $1.375 billion for 55 miles of barriers in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, with some restrictions on the location of the new fencing.

That barrier funding is much less than the $5.7 billion Trump had demanded for the construction of more than 200 miles of wall — and less than would have been provided by an earlier Senate agreement for $1.6 billion and 65 miles of fencing, a deal that Trump rejected, resulting in the 35-day government shutdown. But it’s nearly three times as many miles as would have been funded under a continuing resolution.

The new agreement also reportedly would fund an average of 45,274 Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention beds over the rest of the fiscal year, with the intention of reducing the number of detainees to 40,520 by the end of the fiscal year — though Republicans say it maintains enough flexibility and funding to detain 52,000 immigrants, as requested in the president’s budget, and potentially as many as 58,500 beds. (You can find a more detailed explanation of the detention issue at Vox, CNN or The Washington Post.)

Will Trump sign off? During a Cabinet meeting at the White House Tuesday, the president said he didn’t like the deal — but he stopped short of saying he would reject it. “Am I happy at first glance? I just got to see it. The answer is no, I’m not. I’m not happy,” Trump said.

At the same time, he said a government shutdown is unlikely — though if one did happen, it would be Democrat’s fault — and that he would be “adding things” to lawmakers’ deal. “It's all going to happen, where we're going to build a beautiful, big, strong wall," he insisted.

“The next 24 hours will be critical as -- if history is any guide -- Trump will deploy his bespoke personal polling methods to key policy advisors in the media and anti-immigration grassroots,” Chris Krueger of the Cowen Washington Research Group wrote Tuesday morning.

Conservatives were quick to criticize the deal, and they have sway with Trump.

  • Fox News host Sean Hannity: “Any Republican that supports this garbage compromise, you will have to explain.”
  • Far-right firebrand Ann Coulter: “Trump talks a good game on the border wall but it's increasingly clear he's afraid to fight for it. Call this his ‘Yellow New Deal.’”
  • Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), chair of the House Freedom Caucus: “This conference agreement is hardly a serious attempt to secure our border or stop the flow of illegal immigration. It kicks the can down the road yet again, failing to address the critical priorities outlined by Border Patrol Chiefs.” Meadows on Tuesday called for Trump to take executive action.
  • Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH): “While the President was giving a great speech in El Paso, Congress was putting together a bad deal on immigration.”

The most likely scenario: Trump will sign off on lawmakers’ deal, avoiding another shutdown, and then look to use executive action to “reprogram” money and start construction of additional border barriers — moves that could be met with legal challenges. “My guess is Trump will say something milquetoast about [the deal], we pass it, Trump signs it but then bashes it, and everyone regrets they ever voted for it,” a senior House GOP aide told Politico.

The president hinted that he’d pursue that path in his remarks to reporters, suggesting he would be “taking from far less important areas” to build his wall. Those areas, Krueger says, could include Army Corps of Engineers' flood control projects in Northern California and Puerto Rico as well as unspent military construction funds. Still unclear, he writes, is “how the White House will explain that instead of Mexico paying for the Wall, it will come from the troops and flood control projects in California and Puerto Rico.”

The bottom line: If that is the path that the White House chooses, the border spending fight won’t be over. It’ll just be entering a new phase, even as the threat of a shutdown will be resolved until fiscal 2020.

Number of the Day: $22 Trillion

The total national debt surpassed $22 trillion on Monday. Total public debt outstanding reached $22,012,840,891,685.32, to be exact. That figure is up by more than $1.3 trillion over the past 12 months and by more than $2 trillion since President Trump took office.

Shutdown Makes a Bad Situation Worse at the IRS

A new report from National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson says that the 35-day government shutdown just before the start of the tax season produced “real harm” for taxpayers as the IRS struggled to respond to inquiries and requests for assistance.

“The five weeks could not have come at a worse time for the IRS — facing its first filing season implementing a massive new tax law, with a completely restructured tax form,” Olson wrote.

More broadly, Olson said the IRS continues to struggle with antiquated technology and reduced headcount, which require significant increases in funding to address.

Here are some highlights from the internal watchdog’s annual report, released Tuesday:

• A huge backlog of work when the shutdown ended: “On January 24, 2019, the IRS had over 5 million pieces of mail that had not been batched for processing; it had 80,000 responses to FY 2018 Earned Income Tax Credit audits that had not been addressed; it had 87,000 amended returns waiting to be processed.”

• The IRS was overwhelmed even before the shutdown: “On December 21, 2018, the day before the shutdown, the IRS was already struggling with its inventory of work. During 2018, the IRS shuffled resources around to meet the challenge of implementing the new tax law while wrestling with record inventory levels of unresolved cases in its fraud detection programs.”

• The IRS saw a “shocking” reduction in the level of phone service: “Immediately before the shutdown, the IRS’s main phone line was significantly improved over the same period the year before (75.4 percent LOS [level of service] for FY 2019 compared to 56.8 percent LOS in FY 2018). But the difference between FY 2018 and FY 2019 for levels of service and wait times for all phone lines at the end of the shutdown and the first week all employees returned is … shocking. For example, the LOS for both the Accounts Management and ACS phone lines experienced at least a 56 percent decrease in FY 2019 from FY 2018 levels.”

• The new 1040 is awfully complicated for a postcard: “[T]he IRS was directed to replace all the existing Individual Income Tax Return forms—the 1040, 1040A, and 1040EZ—with a single new Form 1040. This new form was reduced to the size of a postcard, two half pages in length, on which it is estimated approximately 47 million taxpayers (32 percent) could meet their filing requirements. By reducing the 1040 to a postcard size, however, this redesign necessitated the creation of an additional six schedules, some containing only three lines of information. Thus, for approximately 70 percent of taxpayers—nearly 102 million—the six new schedules increase the number of already existing schedules, such as A, B, C, D, or E, that taxpayers must complete. While many taxpayers will use software to complete the return, the new schedules will force some taxpayers to cross-reference and transfer data such as credits, deductions, and income, increasing the potential for errors to occur since the tax information is dispersed over many pages and needs to be tracked down and reported on different schedules and forms.”

• IRS technology is severely out of date: “The IRS desperately needs to replace its antiquated technology systems. Indeed, this is the agency’s #1 need. Last year, the IRS experienced a systems crash on the final day of the tax-filing season, forcing the IRS to extend the filing season by a day. The crash prompted talk of the risk of a catastrophic systems collapse, and that risk does, indeed, exist.”

• The tax agency needs billions more in funding: “[G]iven the additional revenue and improved taxpayer service state-of-the-art technology is likely to bring in, I believe spending for new systems going forward should be measured in billions—not millions. In this report, our #1 legislative recommendation is that Congress provide the IRS with additional dedicated, multi-year funding to replace its core IT system … so it can deliver the service and compliance activities that are expected of a 21st century tax administration.”

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