Commerce Department Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed on Fox News that President Donald Trump has a goal to abolish the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and “let all the outsiders pay.”
“As the president said, reciprocal tariffs, either you bring yours down or we’re going to bring ours up. If we go to their level, it will earn us $700 billion a year to be equal to everybody else,” Lutnick told Jesse Watters. “And there goes our deficit. And interest rates come smashing down, and the whole economy explodes higher.”
“We’ve got the power. We’ve got to use tariffs. We’ve got to use the External Revenue Service to take care of America and cut the scams and the abuse, the waste. And let’s make America great,” he said.
“Cruise ships — you ever see a cruise ship with an American flag on the back? They have flags of, like, Liberia or Panama. None of them pay taxes. “Every supertanker, none pays taxes. Alcohol, all foreign alcohol, no taxes. This is going to end under Donald Trump,” Lutnick noted, adding that taxes are “going to be paid and Americans’ tax rates are going to come down. That’s what Donald Trump wants to do, balance our budget and cut our taxes.”
Trump previously announced plans to create an “External Revenue Service” to collect tariffs from other countries.
“For far too long, we have relied on taxing our Great People using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS),” he wrote on Truth Social. “Through soft and pathetically weak Trade agreements, the American Economy has delivered growth and prosperity to the World, while taxing ourselves. It is time for that to change.”
American Faith reported that the IRS terminated an estimated 6,000 employees, representing about 6% of its workforce.
