Acting IRS Chief Resigns After Refusing to Comply With Illegal Immigrant-Sharing Deal
The acting head of the Internal Revenue Service plans to step down after disagreeing with the decision to share tax data on illegal immigrants with federal law enforcement.
Commissioner Melanie Krause will become the third IRS leader to leave the agency since the start of the year. The agency has been turbulent because left-wing ideologues have decided to follow their political leanings rather than their pledge to serve as non-partisan government employees.
On Monday, the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security finalized an agreement allowing taxpayer data to be shared with federal immigration authorities to assist in locating undocumented immigrants.
According to the Washington Post, officials from the Treasury Department, under which the IRS operates, had largely sidelined Krause recently as they pushed to grant immigration authorities access to private taxpayer information, likely because they knew she would oppose the agreement.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem signed the data-sharing agreement, despite warnings from IRS attorneys that the arrangement likely violated federal privacy laws, the report said.
“Melanie Krause has been leading the IRS through a time of extraordinary change,” a Treasury spokesperson said in an emailed statement confirming her resignation.
Without mentioning the data agreement, the spokesperson noted further that the agency was “in the midst of breaking down data silos that for too long have stood in the way of identifying waste, fraud, and abuse and bringing criminals to justice.”
Krause’s predecessor, Doug O’Donnell, stepped down as acting commissioner after declining to sign a similar data-sharing agreement with the Department of Homeland Security in February. The last Senate-confirmed IRS commissioner, Danny Werfel, resigned on President Donald Trump’s first day in office.
Krause has chosen to apply for a deferred resignation program currently offered by the IRS, according to a source familiar with her decision. The individual, speaking on condition of anonymity, said her decision to step down was influenced in part by concerns over the recently finalized data-sharing agreement, Reuters noted.
The IRS began implementing sweeping workforce reductions on Friday, dismantling its civil rights office and initiating mass firings that could eliminate up to 25% of its staff.
The cuts are part of a broader overhaul of the federal workforce that has already resulted in the loss of more than 200,000 jobs. President Donald Trump has appointed billionaire Elon Musk to lead the effort to restructure and streamline the federal government through his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team.
Earlier this month, Musk told Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz that “magic money computers” within the U.S. government are generating payments “out of thin air,” leaving lawmakers clueless about federal spending.
Speaking on Cruz’s podcast, Musk revealed that 14 such systems exist within the U.S. Treasury and other agencies, transferring large sums without the necessary evidence to justify the payments.
Musk claimed that in departments housing one of these systems, reported spending could be off by as much as 5 percent of the budget when presented to Congress, while Cruz suggested that these improper payments could potentially total “trillions” of dollars.
“They’re mostly at Treasury,” Musk said about the computers discovered by his U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, “but there’s some at [Health and Human Services], there’s one or two at State, there’s some at [the Department of Defense].”
“I think we’ve found now 14 magic money computers. They just send money out of nothing,” he told the Texas Republican senator.
Expounding on DOGE’s discovery, the unconventional entrepreneur explained that the presence of these computers prevents the Treasury Dept. from fully informing lawmakers about the federal government’s total spending.
“You may think that government computers all communicate with each other, synchronize, and accurately calculate where funds are going, making the numbers you see as a senator the real ones. They’re not,” he said.
Top DHS Special Agent And His Wife Found Dead
A Department of Homeland Security special agent and his wife were found dead in their New Jersey home in what appears to be a murder-suicide, prosecutors said.
Police in Sayreville responded to the couple’s home on Glynn Court around 8 p.m. July 3 and found Kelly Latauro, 46, dead inside the residence, the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office said.
Her husband, 52-year-old Christopher Latauro, was discovered dead in the backyard.
Both appear to have been shot.
Authorities said Christopher is believed to be the shooter and the case is being investigated as a murder-suicide.
Police told residents to keep away from Glynn Court, from Deerfield Road to Scarlet Drive, briefly because of police activity.
The area was reopened about 40 minutes later, but police remained on scene.
According to NJ101.5, citing DHS records from 2019 and 2020, Christopher was a special agent for the Department of Homeland Security.
Authorities have not said what may have sparked the violence.
Kelly’s sister-in-law Robyn Perlman-Spencer confirmed her death in a Facebook post on July 7, remembering her in a heartbreaking tribute.
“As many of you may now know, my beautiful sister in law Kelly Iatauro was senselessly and suddenly taken from us on Friday. Kelly was a bright light- kind, thoughtful, hysterical, inappropriate, and just one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known. She left a lasting impression on anyone that was lucky enough to know her,” Robyn wrote in part.
Sayreville police confirmed officers responded to the Glynn Court residence on July 3 and found both people dead of gunshot wounds.
The incident is being treated as a murder-suicide, and Christopher is suspected to be the shooter, the spokesperson said.
The Department of Homeland Security and Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office did not immediately respond to additional requests for comment on the case.
What began as a heavy police response to a deadly scene left two people dead and the quiet Middlesex County neighborhood stunned.
Investigators are still trying to piece together what happened inside the home leading up to the gunfire.
Separately, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin made headlines last week with an election-related announcement.
Mullin on Friday said officials who don’t cooperate with the administration’s election security efforts may be slapped with fines — and potentially prison time.
“If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections — and they chose not to — then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time,” Mullin said during a press conference at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Mullin also promised DHS would work to “speed up our security enhancements” for states.
He vowed to hold up federal election security grants until state officials took steps the administration demanded, including running their voter registration lists through a system that checks for non-citizen voters on the rolls.
Mullin made his comments after President Donald Trump’s primetime address on election security Thursday night, when he repeated already known concerns about the security of voting systems, alleged Chinese efforts to get into voter rolls, and aired old gripes about the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.
In his remarks on Friday, the DHS secretary focused on DHS’s work with states to secure election systems and scrub voter registration rolls for fraud and concerns about noncitizen voting.
The Justice Department also sent letters this month threatening prosecution to election officials across the country if they don’t remove noncitizens from their voter rolls.
On Friday, Mullin seemed to suggest that the agency was able to estimate the numbers using the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and said 23 states are already working with DHS to analyze voter rolls.
And he criticized the legal challenges that are hindering the administration’s efforts: Last month, a judge blocked the Trump administration from creating a database of information about Americans, including Social Security numbers and citizenship status.
