by Sharad Swaney
Dear Room,
The workers who audit the rest of us are now asking a judge to stop the government from telling them not to audit Donald Trump.
That is the story.
On August 6, the union representing Treasury Department and IRS employees asked a federal judge to block the Trump administration's tax-audit immunity agreement. The union says employees are being forced to choose between following a political order and following the law.
Under the immunity order, the lawsuit says, IRS employees would have to drop ongoing audits of Trump and his businesses. The Justice Department has said the arrangement applies retroactively to the claims covered by the settlement, not to future filings. But the fact that a sitting president obtained a deal with agencies inside his own executive branch that blocks audits of him and his family is still breathtaking.
A president sued the government. His Justice Department helped settle the case. The settlement gave him protection from tax scrutiny. Now career tax employees are in court asking whether they are being told to do something illegal.
How did this happen?
Trump sued the Treasury Department and the IRS over the leak of his tax information. In May, the Justice Department announced a settlement. Part of the deal included an Anti-Weaponization Fund that was later rescinded after bipartisan backlash. Another part was an agreement stopping the IRS from pursuing certain audits and claims involving Trump, his family, and his businesses.
A federal judge had already raised serious questions about the arrangement. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden said the judge described the immunity order as one that "directly contravenes" federal law. Former IRS and Justice Department officials have also challenged the legality of the deal.
The union's new request puts the problem in the plainest possible terms. What are the people inside the IRS supposed to do when the law says one thing and the people above them say another?
Before I keep going, please hit subscribe.
This is why independent reporting matters. The weirdest uses of power are often written down in settlement language that most people never see.
Why the IRS has to be separate.
Nobody likes getting audited. I get that. The IRS is not a beloved institution in this country.
But the reason tax enforcement has rules is simple. The people with the most money and the most political power cannot be the ones who decide whether they have to follow those rules.
You do not need to love the IRS to understand the danger of a president getting a tax deal no ordinary person could negotiate. If the president can bring a lawsuit against agencies he controls and then receive special protection through his own Justice Department, the public is being asked to accept a system where the person at the top can act as the plaintiff, the beneficiary, and the ultimate boss of the people handling the case.
That is not how equal treatment is supposed to work.
The administration's defenders can argue the original leak of tax information was wrong. It was. Private tax records should not be unlawfully leaked. That does not answer the separate question of whether a president can obtain an audit shield from the government he runs. One wrong does not create a right to special treatment forever.
The part that gets under my skin.
I am 20 years old. I am trying to build something real with Centered America while watching the rules look different depending on who is standing in front of them. Most people do not get a meeting with the Justice Department to settle a dispute with the IRS. Most people do not get a promise that the audit hanging over them will disappear because the government decided to make it disappear.
They fill out forms. They worry about a letter in the mail. They pay an accountant if they can afford one. They hope they did everything right.
That is why this is not a dry tax story. It is about whether rules are still rules when the person with the most power in the country is the person who does not want them applied.
Why I am asking here.
I do not want a country where you need a law degree to notice when something is wrong. The simple version is enough. The IRS should not be told to stop auditing the president because the president made a deal with his own administration.
I write these posts so the documents do not stay buried in a court docket. If you value that, support it here.
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The quiet part.
The damage is not only whether this agreement survives in court. The damage is what it teaches everyone watching.
It teaches a president that an agency under his control can be used to solve his personal legal problems. It teaches career employees that they may be asked to put politics above their work. It teaches regular taxpayers that the system has an exit door, but only for the person with the keys to the building.
The union is asking a judge to close that door. They should not have to be the ones doing it.
If this makes you angry, restack it. This is exactly the kind of story that gets called technical until people realize it is about whether the people writing the rules are exempt from them.
Thank you for being in this room.
— Sharad
If you want to support the work without a subscription, you can buy me a coffee. Every bit genuinely helps keep this publication going.
A note for the room: I am 20 years old, running a nonprofit and this publication on my own. I work with research and editing tools, including Claude, an AI assistant, to keep up, the way other reporters work with editors and fact-checkers. Every quote and every source in this post was verified by me before anything went live. Other people will not tell you this, but I really care about journalistic integrity. Letting you know I use these tools to help me do this work all on my own is important to me. The room means trust, and trust means I tell you how the work gets made.
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