President Joe Biden insisted that giving the Internal Revenue Service $80 billion and hiring 87,000 new agents would be all about targeting the wealthy, not the middle class. Unsurprisingly, it turns out his new bulked-up IRS is the same as it always was.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration issued a report on the progress that Biden promised for his beefed-up IRS, something Biden’s Treasury Department officials said would bring in $561 billion in revenue over the next decade. It is off to an inauspicious start, with IRS officials saying the service won’t be tracking its own progress until later this year. According to TIGTA, the IRS’s April 2023 strategic plan “did not include specifics on how the IRS was going to ensure it met this commitment.”

We know that the agency is already not meeting its hiring goals. Despite the $80 billion infusion, the IRS has hired only 34 new agents over six months, pathetically below the pace of its goal of hiring 3,700 in the first year of expansion. That helps explain why the agency is also still targeting middle-class taxpayers, with 63% of new audits targeting those earning under $200,000, as of last summer.

This is exactly what was warned when Biden pushed this plan while supporters of it claimed that Republicans just wanted to help tax cheats avoid paying their fair share. As our Washington Examiner editorial laid out in January 2023, even if all 87,000 agents were tasked with auditing taxpayers, they would get through audits of those making more than $5 million per year in “just over one week” and would earn $18 billion in revenue, “a fraction of the $70 billion Democrats claimed they could raise.”

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The rest would come from lower- and middle-class taxpayers who don’t have an army of lawyers and tax experts to fight the government machine. Democrats did not and do not want to make the tax code easier to understand for those taxpayers, despite the fact that a complex tax code favors the wealthy who can hire lawyers to exploit the system. As always, the increased cash was not going to change the IRS’s targets. Evidently, it hasn’t even changed the manpower in the agency.

This was always going to be the outcome, whether Biden intended it to be or whether he truly believed he could turn the IRS into a machine that hounded the rich. Normal people will continue to be funneled through the IRS machine because all Biden did was burn another $80 billion in taxpayer dollars just to end up with the same old status quo.