The I.R.S. lost roughly a quarter of its employees since President Trump took office, hampering the agency’s ability to conduct audits.
Page F1From§Eachthe midnight edition — 1 September 2026
Pentagon inks 7-year interceptor deals as IRS audit revenue plummets under Trump.
As it ran on the front
Two documents, filed close together, worth setting side by side. The first: the Pentagon has signed seven-year deals to bolster interceptor production, a multi-year commitment, the kind of number that gets its own press release, locked in regardless of what next year's budget fight looks like. The second: a federal watchdog reports that IRS audit revenue has plummeted under the current administration, also a number, also filed, getting considerably less attention.
Let's reconcile. One line of the federal ledger commits seven years forward, guaranteed, for interceptor production. Another line of the same ledger, the one that collects money owed rather than spends it, is going the other direction, and going there fast enough that a watchdog felt the need to say so out loud. Both of these are choices. Nobody signs a seven-year contract by accident, and audit revenue doesn't fall through simple bad luck — audits are a function of enforcement staffing and enforcement priority, both of which are set, not discovered.…
…(cont) So the gap is this: money going out, long-term, guaranteed, for hardware. Money coming in, short-term, declining, from the people the audits were supposed to check. That's not a coincidence of timing, hon, that's two separate decisions that happen to land in the same fiscal year and point in opposite directions.
Whose column benefits from an audit division with less bite? Not the household one, the household doesn't get audited less because enforcement is down, it just gets less company on the way down. The gap benefits whoever the audits were finding money on, and the interceptor deal benefits whoever builds interceptors. Neither of those is the taxpayer filing a standard return, and neither of those numbers moved by accident.
The filing doesn't say why. The filing doesn't need to. It just needs to be read next to the other filing, and the two of them, side by side, do the explaining on their own.
“Money for missiles for the next seven years, locked in, no debate. Money for chasing tax cheats — that's the one that mysteriously dries up. They'll tell you there's no cash for anything, but there's always a seven-year contract waiting when the right vendor asks.”
“These interceptor contracts ensure long-term national security readiness — multi-year procurement is fiscally responsible, it locks in lower unit costs. The audit numbers are a separate matter, unrelated to defense spending, and any suggestion they're connected is — well, they're both federal budget lines, so maybe it's a little related.”
The receipts
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…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.