New documents showed how the IRS panicked after the Trump administration sought to put former President Donald Trump’s signature on COVID-19 stimulus checks.
In March 2020, Congress passed the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, providing $1,200 stimulus checks to roughly 80 million taxpayers. Chaos ensued when an order from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin asked that Trump’s name be added to the checks.
While criticized by many Democratic figures, new documents obtained through a Bloomberg Freedom of Information Act request found that the IRS internally panicked over the order, frantically trying to figure out whether or not Trump’s request would violate any laws.
Given the three-week deadline to send out the first round, IRS personnel scrambled for legal guidance to figure out whether the move was legal. The 2020 checks were the first time in U.S. history that the president’s name appeared on an IRS expenditure.
“Did Counsel push back on this? Did anyone raise the concern about how this makes the IRS appear?” one IRS official wrote to then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig and others at the agency in an email obtained by Bloomberg.
The primary concern of some IRS agents was that the inclusion of the signature was a political move, making the IRS a party to a politicization effort. They feared the inclusion could violate the Hatch Act.
“The one thing I want to document and get for us on the IRS side is a position from” ethics officials “that the IRS is not violating the HATCH act,” Kenneth Corbin, a wage and investment commissioner, said in another email. “I imagine we want this cover for all parties at the IRS.”
The IRS took the unprecedented step of seeking legal counsel, given by Mark Kaizen, a top Treasury Department lawyer.
The inclusion of Trump’s name was found to be legal and able to proceed.
Trump was roundly criticized at the time for politicizing a pandemic that shuttered the global economy and was killing thousands of people. The CARES Act funds that allowed the $1,200 checks to get mailed out as a way to stanch the economic bleeding left by people being forced to stay home was a bipartisan effort. But by slapping his name on the checks, Trump ensured everyone who received one would associate the stimulus with him.
The plan worked and inspired Trump to call for more stimulus checks, bucking the fiscal hawks in his party and allying with Democrats who were calling for $2,000 payments that would continue to blow out the federal government’s pocketbook.
But voters remember seeing Trump’s name four years later and might be persuaded that he is looking out for them more than Vice President Kamala Harris.
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Voters tell pollsters they tend to trust Trump more than Harris on economic issues, and though the former president’s skeptics insist his messaging is mostly “misinformation” about the economy, his signature next to dollar signs is seared in their memory.
“You hear it from a lot of people because that’s what Trump is running on, with people thinking that he was the one that got them those checks,” Dr. La’Toshia Patman, a volunteer for a door-knocking organization in Detroit, told the Washington Examiner.