Danny Werfel’s term has not yet expired, but the president-elect has already said he wants to appoint a new IRS chief.
By Eric Johnson | Jan 18, 2025 at 02:02 a.m. ET Updated | Economics & Politics
Danny Werfel, the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, will resign Monday, he told employees, as President-elect Donald Trump eyes a successor to undo much of President Joe Biden’s agenda at the tax agency.
Though the commissioner’s term wasn’t due to expire until 2027, Trump had previously announced plans to fire Werfel, who took office in 2023, and nominate Billy Long, a former Missouri congressman without any tax policy experience, to replace him.
Long’s Senate confirmation is not in doubt given the Republican majority in the chamber.
“Once the president announced his plans to bring in a new IRS commissioner, I had to recognize that the incoming team wanted to go in a new direction in terms of who was leading the IRS,” Werfel told The Washington Post. “So I worked to determine what would be the best departure timing that would stay true to my ongoing commitment to the IRS mission and also to my commitment to doing what’s necessary to support a successful transition.”
Deputy IRS Commissioner Doug O’Donnell will lead the agency in the interim, Werfel said. O’Donnell previously served as acting commissioner in 2022 before Werfel took office.
Congressional Democrats urged Werfel to remain in office and force Trump to fire him.
Trump in his first term had mused about sending IRS agents after political opponents, and many tax experts are concerned that Long — as other Trump appointees have promised — will try to punish the president-elect’s perceived enemies.
Werfel said he was “confident that there are checks and balances in place to effectively prevent that politicization,” and that his decision to step down was in part aimed at heading off any notion of political allegiance at the agency.
“There’s a precedent for having commissioners complete their five-year terms, and when the president announced his plans to replace the IRS leadership, it signaled that he was moving away from that precedent,” Werfel said. “I am a fan of that precedent. I think that precedent helps for continuity and aligns with the IRS’s nonpartisanship. But I also recognize that the president has the authority to remove a commissioner at will and to select a new commissioner.
“This issue will be debated, and it should be. Right now in this moment, I had to do what I felt was best for the agency, and I didn’t want to be a distraction for the employees and the IRS mission.”
Werfel presided over a transformation at the tax service after Biden and congressional Democrats infused it with tens of billions of dollars in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
The resources allowed the agency to begin modernizing its long-outdated IT systems and roll out a suite of new customer service features to make tax-filing easier. Individuals can upload dozens of forms to the IRS and in a number of states file their taxes directly with the agency free, using a government-backed feature that competes with paid tax-prep software such as Intuit TurboTax and H & R Block.
The results were successful overall, tax experts said. The IRS squashed its once multimillion-page backlog of tax filings and slashed wait times on customer service helplines.
New funding for stricter scrutiny of high-income taxpayers and major corporations netted billions of dollars in overdue payments and penalties, a feather in the Biden administration’s cap as it argued for “tax fairness.”
But Republicans said the new resources amounted to an overreach and a “shakedown” of middle-class taxpayers. The GOP has sought to claw back tens of billions of dollars from the IRS and is poised to rescind even more in a party-line tax and spending bill.
Werfel said he had not met with Trump transition officials aside from remedial briefings on the agency’s work. He offered to remain in his post until Long was confirmed by the Senate, but did not receive any answer to that proposal from Trump officials.
“Danny is not a political guy. He’s a great public servant. He did a great job, and I think was willing to do whatever he could to be helpful,” said John Koskinen, who served as IRS commissioner in the Obama and Trump administrations. “In some ways, his idea of gracefully stepping aside in light of any lack of indication that the new administration wanted him, he thought the most helpful thing to do would be to quietly step aside.”
Werfel said he hoped Long and the incoming Trump economic policy team would preserve the agency’s “momentum.”
“Enough progress has been made that important wins for taxpayers are on the horizon in the coming year or two, and I think the new administration will benefit from taking us across the finish line on some of the projects that are underway,” he said.
