There is a legend of Alexander the Great, who while marching his army through Anatolia, happened across a town called Gordium. In Gordium, the townspeople showed Alexander the famous chariot of the founder of the city, Gordius. The chariot was lashed to a pole with an incomprehensible knot, with both ends of the rope hidden away. Legend had it that the knot could only be unraveled by the future conqueror of Asia. Many had tried to undo the knot and failed.
Alexander drew his sword and cleft the great knot in twain.
Today much of our federal government is likewise bound up in a Gordian knot, and even the dedicated DOGE and Trump administration officials are trying to unravel these knots. Case in point: The Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, and DOGE deputy Sam Corcos appeared Thursday on Fox News's "The Ingraham Angle" to talk about the tangled knots binding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS.)
As the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) looks to slash waste and correct inefficiencies, one DOGE adviser revealed it's "hard to really grasp the scale" of problems facing the IRS.
"A huge part of our government is collecting taxes. We cannot perform the basic functions of tax collection without paying a toll to all these contractors. We really have to figure out how to get out of this hole. We're in a really deep hole right now," DOGE representative Sam Corcos said on "The Ingraham Angle" Thursday.
The DOGE also took to X to provide a thumbnail of the problems at the IRS.
There is a pattern across all agencies where IT “modernization” contracts do not pay for outcomes/performance; instead, they pay for time. Therefore, the incentive is for contractors to “never finish,” resulting in incredible waste.
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) March 21, 2025
As an example, IRS modernization started in… pic.twitter.com/1OZn8DDTrL
The post continues:
As an example, IRS modernization started in 1990 to be delivered in 1996. Today, the work is not complete and the contractors say it’s still 5 years away. 29 years behind schedule and ~$15b over budget. Everyone loses, except the government contractors.
This must change. This week, the IRS froze ~$1.5B in modernization contracts, none of which have any effect on tax filings. All of those contracts will then either be cancelled or the contract terms will be changed to pay-for-performance.
That's a good start. But these actions, these contract re-evaluations, leave us with the same basic system. It will, in time, grow back to its current labyrinthian mess. Maybe it's time to cut the Gordian knot.
See also: Do You Drive a Luxury Car? Democrats Do, on Your Dime
One thing that we haven't seen considered, at least out loud, is replacing the income tax and payroll taxes with a retail-level consumption tax. Now this would require the repeal of the 16th Amendment, which authorized the income tax, or sure as shooting, we'd end up with both. And this must not be a European-style Value Added Tax (VAT) that taxes production at every step. No, a national, retail-level sales tax, with certain exemptions and allowances, would give every American skin in the game; almost everyone would pay something, and what's more, the infrastructure for collecting sales taxes is already well-established in most places.
What you tax, you get less of; what you reward, you get more of. Right now we're taxing production and enterprise, and we have a horrendously complex system for doing so.
There's already a proposal to do just what is outlined above. It's called the FairTax, and it's been introduced in every Congress since 2005.
The FairTax is a national sales tax that treats every person equally and allows American businesses to thrive, while generating the same tax revenue as the current four-million-word-plus tax code. Under the FairTax, every person living in the United States pays a sales tax on purchases of new goods and services, excluding necessities due to the prebate. The FairTax rate after necessities is 23% compared to combining the 15% income tax bracket with the 7.65% of employee payroll taxes under the current system -- both of which will be eliminated!
Perfect? No. Better than the existing mess? Sure thing.
Secretary Bessent and the DOGE are doing great work, work that needs doing. The IRS has grown into a Pantagruelian beast, vast and insatiable. An entire industry has grown up around the current system of collecting federal taxes. Ask a tax question to three different tax preparers and you'll get six different answers; the tax code is so vast and convoluted that nobody really understands it.
Maybe it's time we took a lesson from Alexander of Macedon.
Every single day, here at RedState, we will stand up and FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT against the radical left as well as the waste in the federal government, and deliver the conservative reporting our readers deserve.
Please help us continue to tell the truth about the Trump administration and its major wins. Join RedState VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member