Welcome to The Hill's Defense & NatSec newsletter {beacon} Defense &National Security Defense &National Security The Big Story Pentagon inks 7-year deals to bolster interceptor production The Pentagon announced on Monday that it reached…
Page F2From§Eachthe midnight edition — 1 September 2026
IRS audit revenue collapses under Trump; the Pentagon signs seven-year missile contracts instead.
As it ran on the front
Let's run the filing against the table, hon. Line one, from the government's own watchdog: IRS audit revenue has plummeted under this administration. Line two, filed the same season: the Pentagon inks seven-year deals to bolster interceptor production, and the Navy unveils a new missile built to strike enemy aircraft from extreme range.
I don't have the dollar figures for either column in front of me — the audit report doesn't give one, the interceptor deal doesn't give one — so I'll stick to what's precise and leave the rest blank rather than guess. What is precise is the shape. One column is going down. The watchdog used the word 'plummeted,' not me. The other column is locking in commitments for seven years, which is a specific, countable number, the kind of number that shows up in a contract because somebody intends to keep paying it.…
…(cont) So we have an enforcement arm collecting less, on paper, from people who owe, at the same time a weapons program is signing seven-year paper promising more, from the same government. Those are two different verbs — collecting less, committing more — applied to two different accounts, in the same fiscal year, under the same signature.
I am not going to tell you what that means. I am going to tell you what it would cost to compare one more year of the audit division's budget against one more year of a seven-year missile contract, except I can't, because only one of those two figures made it into the reporting. That itself is worth filing.
The gap isn't only in what's collected and what's committed. The gap is in which of those two figures gets published with a number attached, and which one just gets the word 'plummeted' and a shrug.
“They can't find the staff to audit rich people, but they found seven years' worth of money for missiles before the ink dried — that's not a budget crunch, that's a budget with a preference. The IRS gets a hiring freeze; the Pentagon gets a subscription plan.”
“Audit staffing is a personnel matter separate from defense procurement, and comparing the two is apples to oranges — the interceptor contracts protect the homeland, full stop, and if collections are down that's an IRS management issue, not — okay, it's the same federal budget, I know, I know.”
The receipts
The I.R.S. lost roughly a quarter of its employees since President Trump took office, hampering the agency’s ability to conduct audits.
Raytheon is developing a new 1,500-pound long-range missile, the AIM-424 LRAAM, to extend the reach and survivability of Navy and Marine aviators.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.