When even progressives complain about the arrogance and incompetence of the Internal Revenue Service , it’s clear the agency needs a housecleaning. Then again, if Congress did its job, the IRS would have less leeway to screw up.

When congressional Democrats rolled over unanimous Republican opposition last year to provide the IRS with an additional $80 billion, much of which was to hire 87,000 new staffers, the agency itself was left significant leeway to decide exactly how to spend the money. This was a dereliction of duty by the Democratic Congress, which not only targeted the money far more heavily toward “enforcement” than to customer service, but even within those parameters, left the IRS with too much wiggle room.

On Aug. 17, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen directed the agency to provide, within six months, an “operational plan detailing how these resources will be deployed over the course of the next decade.” The plan, she said, “must include metrics for areas of focus and targets over the course of the coming years.” Before Congress even approved the new money, then-Commissioner of the IRS Charles Rettig had said, “We don’t plan to wait six months to implement what Congress provides to us. We will be ready.”

Of course, the IRS missed the Feb. 17 deadline .

Dedicated conservative watchdogs such as Americans for Tax Reform naturally blasted the agency’s failure , with ATR’s John Kartch writing that “Perhaps it should be assessed penalties and interest for each day late as regular Americans must do when they miss IRS deadlines.”

While conservative outrage is valuable and should not be taken for granted, it also is not unexpected. Progressives, on the other hand, tend to be IRS boosters (which is why they pushed for the $80 billion in the first place!), so when a leading progressive voice condemns the agency, that means the agency really has messed up.

Yet last week, Howard Gleckman of the Urban Institute wrote a column excoriating the IRS’s failure . The Urban Institute is a liberal think tank (historically rated to the left of the NAACP) founded by President Lyndon Johnson’s administration and financed both through big-government grants and a slew of progressive foundations.

“All I know,” wrote Gleckman, “is if somebody promised me $80 billion, or even $80,000, and all I had to do was describe by February 17 how I’d spend it, I’d be pretty sure to make the deadline.”

Instead, the IRS press officer blithely says the agency “expects to deliver the plan to [Secretary Yellen] in coming weeks,” whatever that means.

If the civil service laws weren’t so weighted against real discipline for bureaucratic failures , and if liberal administrations such as Joe Biden’s weren’t blase about holding federal workers to account, numerous IRS employees would lose their jobs over this administrative lassitude. Or, better yet, Congress would pass another law, this time clawing back some of the extravagant $80 billion and explicitly redirecting most of the rest of it to the “help desk” for honest taxpayers who can’t even get an agent to pick up the phone .

When Congress gives $80 billion in additional money to an outfit already famous for near-criminal negligence and abusiveness, it should be no surprise that the outfit will be negligent about deadlines as well.

The question is, will Yellen do anything about the IRS’s defiance? Does she even care?