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The Democrats’ climate and tax bill known as the Inflation Reduction Act [IRA] which is expected to become law later this week will include billions to modernize the Internal Revenue Service‘s IT business systems and digital asset monitoring. The IRS would receive $80 billion of the $430 billion reconciliation package, of which $4.8 billion is allocated to upgrade some of its highly antiquated digital business systems it uses to administer taxpayer services, operations, and cybersecurity. The bill’s IRS business modernization funds could also be invested on “technology to provide a more personalized customer service,” the bill stated, such as automated callback systems for phone lines, but could not be used to operate legacy systems. The politically controversial Democrat sponsored legislation, known as H.R. 5376 outlines that the IRS can also use some of the $25 billion allotted for operations support for “information technology development, enhancement, operations, maintenance, and security,” the bill states. Advertisement The bill also includes language about funding being used for “digital asset monitoring and compliance activities” and investigative technology for use in criminal investigations related to cybercrimes and crypto currencies for example. The IRS’s significant inefficiencies due to tech struggles are well known, with some of its main computers still run on programming language dating back to the 1960s called COBOL and the agency operates dozens of digital case management systems that don’t work well with each other. Some of its programs are so old that the IRS has been forced to spend large sums on training new hires in using outdated technological systems and applications. House Subcommittee on Government Operations Chair Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., earlier this year ascribed some of the IRS’s operational difficulties and staff shortages to years of underinvestment in technology systems, including a failure to automate some of the most basic tax administration measures. Charles Rettig, the commissioner of the IRS earlier this year also criticized the start-stop nature of IT funding provided to the agency by Congress, saying it is “virtually impossible” for any organization to develop a cohesive technology plan with such funding uncertainty.

The opportunity now exists to make those words Reagan used as a scare tactic actually mean something positive. Charles O. Rossotti, the former IRS commissioner from 1997 to 2002, in a late-December article for a tax publication called the $80 billion “a once-in-a-century opportunity to restore a depleted IRS.” The money could make customer service functional and taxes less of a chore for the vast majority of Americans, while significantly increasing public revenue simply by collecting what’s due, and restoring a small measure of faith that nobody is above the law, no matter how rich. However, Rossotti added that the moment still presented “serious risks for the Biden administration and the U.S. tax system,” potentially leaving the IRS in a worse position ten years from now. Without a permanent commissioner who can steer the agency and ample support from the White House, this once-in-a-generation moment could fall victim to political pressure and administrative inefficiencies.

The Internal Revenue Service is finally about to get the additional funding its officials have long been waiting for. The Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act calls for delivering nearly $80 billion to the IRS over 10 years. After months of negotiations over the sweeping spending package, the Senate passed the bill earlier this month, sending the legislation to the House for a vote before it reaches President Joe Biden’s desk. The funding would help support the work of the IRS – including but not limited to audits – and in turn, is expected to bring in more federal tax revenue to help offset the cost of the Democrats’ plan to lower prescription drug costs and combat climate change.

The bulk of the climate and energy spending included in that law — $270 billion of the nearly $370 billion total — will be delivered through tax incentives. That means the Treasury Department and the IRS — agencies that aren’t always associated with climate policy — will be at the center of the law’s implementation. “While our agency has experience with existing tax credits for many clean energy activities, the Inflation Reduction Act requires a vast amount of innovative work in a short period of time,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told reporters Wednesday. The department is preparing to roll out guidance and rules in the coming months “to implement the tax revisions that will enable the transformation that is needed to make these investments real,” he added, noting that it will be a sprint for the agency to comply. “This is an important responsibility, and Treasury stands ready to meet it,” Adeyemo said.

The Inflation Reduction Act would provide nearly $80 billion to the IRS over 10 years, in addition to the money the agency normally receives from Congress on an annual basis. The IRS received nearly $12.6 billion for fiscal year 2022. The new funding would result in a more than 50% increase in IRS funding adjusted for inflation, Holtzblatt said. The $80 billion would be spread across four different areas of the IRS over the next decade. More than half, about $45.6 billion, would go toward strengthening enforcement activities – including collecting taxes owed, providing legal support, conducting criminal investigations and providing digital asset monitoring, according to the bill text. More than $25 billion would be allocated to support IRS operations, including expenses like rent payments, printing, postage and telecommunications. Nearly $4.8 billion would be used for modernizing the agency’s customer service technology, like developing a callback service. Roughly $3 billion would be allocated for taxpayer assistance, filing and account services. How many new auditors could be hired? The Republican National Committee and several Republican lawmakers have criticized the new IRS funding, claiming that it will provide the agency with an “army of 87,000 new IRS agents.” But that number is misleading. The Treasury Department did estimate in 2021 that a nearly $80 billion investment in the IRS could allow the agency to hire 86,852 full-time employees over the course of a decade. But that figure accounts for all workers, not solely enforcement agents. Still, hiring more than 86,000 workers over 10 years could be a huge increase for the IRS, which currently has nearly 80,000 employees. But the number of IRS staff has declined over the past decade, currently standing at 1970s levels, and the agency is expected to keep losing people. Earlier this year, Rettig told lawmakers that the IRS would need to hire 52,000 people over the next six years just to maintain current staffing levels to replace those who retire or otherwise leave. The Inflation Reduction Act does not instruct the IRS to hire a certain number of enforcement agents, and the agency would need to decide on staffing plans. “The resources to modernize the IRS will be used for sorely needed improvements to taxpayer services – from answering the phones to improving 1960s-era IT systems – and to crack down on wealthy and corporate tax evaders who cost the American people hundreds of billions of dollars each year,” Natasha Sarin, Treasury Department counselor for tax policy and implementation, said in a statement sent to CNN.

Today marks the beginning of tax filing season—the annual period during which Americans file their tax returns. The tax dollars collected by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) each year enable the federal government to serve the American people by providing essential services and benefits. From the Social Security payments that support our seniors to paying and protecting our troops to the climate investments that will help us transition to a net-zero economy, the IRS’s ability to collect revenue undergirds the provision of the services on which all Americans depend. The IRS has faced significant challenges in recent years, driven by chronic underinvestment in its people and technology and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, the IRS has been unable to answer the high volume of taxpayer phone calls they receive, and families and businesses have seen their refunds delayed due to slow processing. Despite these challenges, IRS employees have continued to rise to the occasion, delivering economic lifelines to hundreds of millions of families and small businesses that kept people afloat during the depths of the pandemic. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has provided long-term resources to tackle these challenges head-on. Thanks to President Biden, the IRA provides additional funding to modernize the IRS—to hire the staff needed to give Americans the level of service they deserve and to build the technology and systems needed to deliver a swift and seamless tax experience. Of course, these changes will not take place overnight. Due to chronic underfunding, the IRS’s workforce remains the same size as it was in the 1970s, and the agency has fewer auditors than at any time since World War II. At the same time, the U.S. population has increased by more than 100 million since 1970, and the economy and tax code have only grown in complexity. What’s more, the IRS’s technology relies on a programming language that was created in the 1960s. Fully rebuilding the IRS will take time. Some of these changes, however, are already underway and will result in noticeable improvements for Americans during this year’s filing season. Together, these reforms will result in faster processing of returns and quicker distributions of the credits and benefits that are vital to so many Americans. To start, we’ve hired 5,000 new customer service staff to answer the IRS’s phones and help ensure taxpayers get the help they need. The IRS answered too small a share of the total number of calls they received last year. These 5,000 new hires will ensure that changes and help address the continued elevation of call volumes we’ve experienced over the past two years. Ultimately, when it comes to customer service, our goal is to ensure that taxpayers can get their questions answered by the IRS as quickly as possible. Last fall, Secretary Yellen set out a goal of an 85 percent level of service. In the past, the IRS has assessed its level of service using a metric that only captures calls answered by customer service representatives. But today, when you seek customer support from a company or business, you typically have the option to speak to a customer representative or use automated support if it will better meet your needs. The IRS has made significant improvements to its automated services in recent years and now gives taxpayers the same option—offering automated phone and chat support, as well as live phone assistance. We look forward to serving millions of taxpayers with these automated options, and one way we will measure our ability to meet taxpayers’ needs is by looking at the overall level of service provided by our customer service representatives and automated support systems together. The IRS will continue to report data on the number of phone calls answered by customer service representatives, as well as data on automated assistance. We’ve also taken steps to fully staff the Taxpayer Assistance Centers that provide in-person support to Americans nationwide. These 361 centers located across the country offer free tax help—to address complex tax questions that may be challenging for individuals or small businesses to handle on their own, to help tax filers without a Social Security Number apply for an Individual Tax Identification Number, or to assist those who may face a language barrier in filing their taxes. As of December, the IRS had hired or selected nearly 650 additional people to provide support to the American people at Taxpayer Assistance Centers this filing season. In addition, more than 100 Taxpayer Assistance Centers nationwide will host monthly Taxpayer Experience Days to provide face-to-face help on Saturdays—when most taxpayers’ schedules allow them to visit these centers. Overall, we are on track to meet Secretary Yellen’s goal to triple the number of Americans served at these centers. These in-person sessions are a vital service for many taxpayers—especially low-income households—helping them receive benefits they count on and for which they are eligible, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and many others. We have also made meaningful progress in streamlining the ways that taxpayers are able to respond to notices from the IRS. In the past, when taxpayers received an IRS notice for things like documentation verification, they had to respond via mail—there was no electronic option. Today, that is no longer the case. Last year, the IRS set an ambitious goal to create an online response option for seven of the most common notices that taxpayers receive. They will exceed that goal at the end of this month, with online response capability available for ten of these notices and more to come as technology improvements are implemented. The ability to respond to notices online is not the only place where we’ve taken steps to move the IRS into the 21st century. The IRS will soon roll out a new digital option for small business owners filing 1099 forms. Millions of small business owners prepare their own taxes, rather than hiring professional tax preparers. We have consistently heard from this group that online filing for 1099s will make a meaningful difference for them, saving time and money. In addition, the IRS is moving forward with plans to automate the scanning of individual paper returns, turning them into native digital copies at the outset of the filing process. Since Secretary Yellen’s promise to automate this process last fall, the IRS has successfully initiated the work to scan nearly 100,000 returns and is working to expand this program to address a large number of the paper returns sent to the IRS every year. Finally, we’re proud that in the U.S., we have a system where the vast majority of people pay their taxes. However, the IRS has historically lacked the resources to effectively audit wealthy and high-income individuals, whose audits are more complex and take more time. These individuals are responsible for a disproportionate share of unpaid taxes, depriving the American public of funds needed to pay vital services and benefits. In total, the gap between taxes owed and taxes paid stands at roughly $600 billion every year; the top 1 percent alone account for $160 billion of this gap, nearly 30 percent. The IRA will help to change that, providing the IRS funding for the tools and personnel needed to go after wealthy tax cheats and ensure they pay their fair share. At the same time, Secretary Yellen has directed that these resources will not be used to raise audit rates for households making less than $400,000, relative to historical levels. Of course, our work is far from over. The resources provided by the IRA will support a top-to-bottom modernization and transformation of the IRS that will continue long after this filing season. But even in the five months since the IRA’s passage, we have made meaningful progress toward our goals that will result in tangible improvements for taxpayers this filing season.

The IRS released a much-anticipated report on Thursday outlining how it will spend new funding on ambitious hiring plans and increased enforcement aimed at wealthy taxpayers and big corporations — but left a long list of questions unanswered, which is bound to aggravate lawmakers. The report describes the agency’s objectives for the $80 billion cash infusion that was provided by Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, including plans to create “world-class” customer service for taxpayers seeking assistance; develop data management systems so IRS employees can have a 360-degree view of a taxpayers’ information; and hire specialized lawyers and accountants who can help audit the most complex corporate and partnership returns. Democratic lawmakers and newly appointed IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel say the agency’s transformation will help bring in an estimated half-trillion dollars that the government misses out on every year due to tax evasion, all the while making it much easier for Americans to file their taxes every year. Republicans fiercely oppose the expansion, contending the agency will unleash an army of auditors against average Americans and small businesses. But the vaguely worded report, which was delivered more than a month later than the deadline Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen set, answered few of the questions that lawmakers have been lobbing at Yellen and IRS officials for months about specific budget forecasts and department hiring. The IRS, which counted around 78,700 employees in 2021, says in the report that it plans to bring on nearly 20,000 new employees by the end of fiscal year 2024. That would include 7,239 hires in enforcement and 6,489 in taxpayer services and surely offset some attrition in the agency’s ranks from retirements.

Yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, first of all, my learning was a combination of reflecting on my time in government, studying reading, but also being engaged across industries. And then I was able, from, from more of an observation standpoint, and advisory standpoint, see the different problems that were coming across public sector leaders desk and, and just kind of understanding that there's a variety of different paths you can take, how do you communicate with the workforce? How do you weigh different options? How do you think about stakeholders both inside and outside of your organization? These are things I knew how to do, and were on my radar screen 10 years ago, but like with anything with age and experience, I just I've gotten sharper, I believe it understanding and I still have a long way to go. Look, I you know, I'm always moving up the learning curve. And, you know, one of my reflections early here at the IRS is, is the leadership team here is super patient. They're excited to have a new commissioner. I think one of the things they like about me early on is that I am in listening mode. I'm not coming in with all the ideas on coming in wanting to collaborate with them on what the right things to do are to serve the mission. What do you hope to accomplish in your first six months on the job? And how do you view success in that position? Like how do you plan to measure whether or not you know you're doing a good job or whether the IRS is doing a good job and achieving, you know, various benchmarks? Yeah, it's, it's a great question. And, you know, in some ways that answer was was handed to me on my first day, which is we have a huge opportunity and responsibility to, to launch our responsibilities under the Inflation Reduction Act, and what Congress expected and the president expected when they pass a law and he signed the law. So the first six months for me are all about a successful continuation of the ramp. And those fall into three buckets, services. And for me, it's we have an opportunity to enhance, modernize and move more towards world class customer service. And there's a variety of different projects that we have spelled out in our in our strategic operating plan that was released April 6, and the priority there is for those that are in the short term, to launch them successfully. The second is enforcement or compliance. And there, the remit is to increase our capacity and performance and how we assess the wealthiest filers in America, that's individuals, corporations, and complex partnerships. And then the third part of our remit is, is what I call the backbone, the technology backbone. Think about the IRS is sitting on infrastructure or foundation. And that foundation is uneven today in terms of how modern it is, and its stability. And that's due to years of of underfunding and under-resourcing that foundation. And so that's the third part of of the priority picture. So what do I want to get accomplished in six months? I want us to be humming in each of those areas with great clarity in terms of what are the top projects that we need to do in each? What are the key steps? And your us a great question, how do we measure ourselves? What does success look like? I like to look backwards, I like to say, what's the press release, we want to write six months from now or what's the, you know, the statement of success. And let's reverse engineer into that. The last point I'll make about all of this is like, we're also trying to get ready for filing season next year. And we really think that's a huge moment of truth for us, right? Because we had a very strong filing season, it will be easily forgotten if we don't come out and think a strong next year when filing season begins. So we want to continue that momentum. And we want each year under the inflation Reduction Act and under this new Euro taxpayers to see and feel a different set of improvements and a smoother and smoother filing season each year, they should come back to our website and say, oh, there's new tools and solutions here. They should find new options when they dial into our call center for for either doing things in an automated way or or enhanced callback options or just a quicker speed to get to the person on the line they need to speak to you mentioned the strategic operating plan on the inflation Reduction Act funding that came out last month. What do you see as the biggest challenges to implementing that plan? Yeah, well, the part of the challenge is, and I refer to it as my public to do list, there's 190 projects in the plan, and we have other activities going on within the IRS. So that's a lot of plates to be spinning simultaneously. And they're all important work, you know, managing the IRS and the responsibility to administer the United States tax system is complicated. And so part of the challenge is, you know, making sure that you have really, really strong, precise organizational structures in place governance, accountable people at the IRS, and then communication is key, right. With change, you have to make sure that all the various stakeholders are aware of the change can comment on it. So another key challenge is making sure that all of these activities that are happening in concert are not only getting done, and we're following a like clockwork playbook here. And that's what I'm pushing for, but also that all our diverse stakeholders have an understanding of what we're trying to achieve and when we're trying to achieve it. So another big challenge is in a dense plan, like what we have with nearly 200 projects, how do we communicate that clearly to all the various stakeholders, so they know what's coming. One of the big components of implementing this plan is going to be hiring new personnel, especially hiring people who have the experience and skill set to audit, high income taxpayers, complex corporations and partnerships. How are you planning to step out up recruiting in those areas and where are you looking to hire people? From and sort of what's the IRS has elevator pitch, as you're, you know, trying to sell people maybe on coming from the private sector into the IRS? I love that question. I do have to work on my elevator pitch. I think so I'll practice here for a moment. But like there's two parts to your question, let me start with a pitch. And the pitch is we have a once in a generation opportunity to to transform and modernize one of the most important organizations in America. You don't have to love the IRS. But and you and you know, and you can complain about the IRS that is your your right, your free speech, right, right. But we are essential to the operations of the United States government and by extension essential to civilized society. So if you have the desire to be part of, of public service, or giving back to your country, or working in a way that that makes you feel patriotic, the IRS is a place where you can do that. And if you want to come to an organization, which is in transition, and transition to build something much better than what we've had in the past, if you want to be a challenging assignment, but one where you leave it, when you leave this organization will be significantly different and better at its job than when you got here. I mean, that's a pretty exciting opportunity. And we need a lot of different type of skill sets, as you said, you know, and I've talked publicly, in my recent hearings, about about the chasm that we have right now, where we have 2600 current staff that review or exam or audit our wealthiest taxpayers, if you go to our wealthiest levels, like above 250 million in assets for corporations or above 10 million assets for partnerships, or north of $5 million a year annual salary for an individual. So these are the really, really wealthy, there are 390,000 of those types of taxpayers that I just described. And there's only 2600 to assess. And so that that is a wide gap. And when you think about these 390,000, taxpayers, these are also our most voluminous and our most complex returns, and that complexity increases every year, it's not getting simpler for us to unpack those filings. So we need not just auditors, but specialized accountants, data scientists, engineers, lawyers, and we're looking for a mix, we're looking for people that are just starting their career, that want to learn on the job and develop a skill set, which is going to be very valuable for us and for them across their career. But also people that are, you know, kind of coming out of retirement out of the private sector or law firms or accounting firms who have been involved and understand how these structures are done so so they can help us in this situation, even the playing field when it comes to assessing these very, very complicated structures. And we have a very simple goal, which is to administer the tax code fairly. And right now, today, we have the ability, the skill set to assess middle and lower income filings, because those are relatively often straightforward, doesn't make it easy. I'm just saying that we have the capacity today, we do not have the capacity to effectively assess our highest income filers in a way that we should. So the goal is really to just even that out and make sure that we're an IRS that's not skewed towards being able to assess one part of our taxpayers, but not another. And I think people want an IRS that is that is nonpartisan, that is fair, that has has balanced of strength across different taxpayer segments. Right now we're out of balance, the inflation Reduction Act [IRA] will help us put in balance and we need people to help us on that journey. Where do you find those people? Well, there's a lot of different places. You know, first of all, you know, I think we Iris has offices all over the country. So we're not constrained to any one regional area. So we have a diverse geography, that we can spread our recruiting efforts. We can look, as I said to people that are, you know, kind of nearing the end of their private sector careers at law firms and accounting firms. We can look to universities who are looking to place students coming out with accounting or actuarial degrees or engineering degrees. I could go on and on because you know, and there are you know, what's really interesting Niomi there are companies right now out there so that you know, you hear it, they're doing significant layoffs. Right. And there's an opportunity potentially for us to sync up with, with companies that are doing layoffs, because we are we are hiring. And so look, there's a lot of matchmaking that we can do in that regard. I think we're off to a good start. In our hiring I've mentioned we've hired somewhere between five and 6000 people, and mostly focused on staffing our call center so that we're answering all the calls. The other thing that's really important to understand, because I think a lot of people think oh god, this is all Iris hiring, and, and plussing up and growing and growing, the reality is we're losing a lot of people. So not only do we have to build capacity that we don't have, we have to make up for for anticipated attrition. You mentioned that one of the challenges with implementation is going to be keeping every you know, all the stakeholders informed. One of those big stakeholders is Congress. Can you sort of talk about your strategy about how you plan to keep Congress updated on your progress, and maybe any areas where the IRS is running into any sort of difficulties? I look, I really think that there's a hugely important role that Congress plays. You know, I can focus on our authorizing committees, House Ways and Means and Senate Finance, you know, in some ways, and in many ways they oversee us, they hold us accountable. They ask questions that have us rethinking our approach, they they call on tiga, or GAO, that creates a set of recommendations that help guide priorities for us. It's an incredibly important institution. And in many ways, there are partners as well, like, I know, there's a lot of politics, and that sometimes kind of crowds the screen. But also I think there's a lot of goodwill and trying to help create a better tax experience for for their constituents. And obviously, we want to do that for all their constituents. And then I think there's a lot of interest in making sure that the tax system runs effectively, so that the nation's finances are healthy. And if we are not doing our job, then the nation's finances suffer deficits grow, the debt goes up. So there is a virtuous circle here of of the IRS operating the tax system effectively. And I think a lot of the members and their staffs believe in that. And therefore, if they're going to partner with us on it, we have to be in regular communication. So that means I making myself available for hearings, whether that's at the committee or the subcommittee level. So they can ask the question, the hearings are a really good opportunity for, for us to get on the same page in terms of what the priorities are, and what the go forward is, and for them to communicate in a very public forum, their concerns and have me answer them. But we can also do, you know, nonpublic briefings to staff and to members. You know, for example, it's hard to get into too much detail when a senator has five minutes. So often, they'll be asking me questions, and then they'll say, you know, Commissioner, can you come and brief me in my team on this so that we can have an hour or more to really dig into what your IT plans are to dig into? What are the root causes of the largest parts of the tax gap? My answer to that is always going to be without hesitation? Yes. The inflation Reduction Act directs the IRS to submit a report to Congress by mid May on the feasibility of an IRS run electronic filing system, is this report still on track to come out in mid May? And I know you've said before, that you don't want to get ahead of what the report is going to say. But once the report comes out, how much time will it take for the IRS to sort of digest the report and study it before determining how you want to proceed following the reports release? Yeah, so the report comes out in mid May, we're on track. It's certainly not complete yet.

This week’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Egypt highlights the growing consensus that multilateral cooperation is necessary to avert environmental catastrophe. But with geopolitical tensions spiking and the US-China rivalry heating up, such efforts seem doomed to fail, much like previous efforts to promote global coordination on vaccines, trade, technological innovation, and macroeconomic policy. The good news is that the consensus may be wrong: A lack of multilateral cooperation need not be fatal to the climate cause. The existing frameworks for international coordination are outdated anyway, and technological competition, fueled by the United States’ climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), may prove to be a more potent driver of innovation, ensuring that the fight against climate change continues apace. So far, the main framework for promoting multilateral cooperation on climate change has relied on the principle of “cash for cuts,” whereby developed countries offer financial aid to persuade developing countries to launch ambitious decarbonization efforts. But this approach is no longer credible, given that the international community has failed to meet its financial commitments and has shown no sign of improving. Worse, the “cash for cuts” paradigm is premised on a double standard. While lower-income countries are asked to reduce emissions, rich countries are increasing their reliance on fossil fuels, particularly in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Moreover, the European Union’s planned border tax on carbon-intensive imports would effectively punish lower-income countries in Africa and elsewhere, limiting their own clean-energy transition. The EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism essentially foists developed-world policies on poorer countries, making it tantamount to climate imperialism. Fortunately, rapid technological advances have sharply reduced the price of renewables bringing decarbonization within financial reach. That is why some developing countries, notably India and China, have embarked on massive renewable-energy programs over the past decade. Nonetheless, given the need for massive investments in renewable-energy infrastructure and already-elevated storage costs, the transition to a net-zero economy is still not financially viable. Moreover, the transition would dislocate millions of people in developing countries who earn their living from fossil fuels, leading to enormous adjustment costs. Underestimating these costs or believing that these problems will resolve themselves is another, subtler form of climate imperialism. While multilateral cooperation in the fight against climate change seems unlikely, America’s new IRA could be a global game changer. By subsidizing renewable-energy research and development, it would obviate the need for onerous and inequitable carbon-taxation mechanisms. More to the point, such measures would help create a new, hopeful narrative that focuses on mitigating climate change through technological innovation and boosting supply, rather than sacrifice and reduced demand. Like the US, few developing countries are likely to “carbon tax” their way to emissions reductions. The IRA could also help lower-income countries to reduce the costs of decarbonization by encouraging the deployment of technologies such as low-cost batteries and carbon capture and storage. In our book Greenprint, Aaditya Mattoo and I argue that by making greater use of these technologies, developing countries could meet their energy needs without increasing global climate emissions. The IRA is essentially a protectionist trade and industrial policy. As such, it could spark an international arms race of green-energy subsidies. But that might be a good thing. A global subsidy war could spur technological innovation, potentially driving down the price of renewables. Moreover, it may do for new technologies what China’s subsidies for photovoltaics did for the global solar-energy industry. As many have warned, the IRA is not without risks. President Joe Biden’s signature legislation links many of its subsidies and incentives to production and research in the US and North America. It thus constitutes what the World Trade Organization calls “local content requirements.” The EU, one of America’s biggest trading partners, has complained about this barrier to trade. But, given the urgency of the existential threat posed by climate change, a global rush to subsidize key technologies seems like a feature, not a bug. To the extent that a global subsidies race could make clean energy financially viable, it would save rich countries the charade of committing to provide trillions of dollars to poorer countries that they cannot raise. Finally, such a race could help resolve developing countries’ grievances about the rich world’s climate hypocrisy. Driving down renewable-energy costs would be a global public good provided by the developed world – assuming, of course, that whatever new technologies emerge would be freely available. The unequal global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines should serve as a reminder that the mere invention of new technologies does not guarantee an equitable distribution. The Green Revolution of the 1960s, when industrialized countries significantly reduced global hunger and poverty by introducing high-yield crops across the developing world, is a useful model for distributing cheap, non-proprietary renewable technologies. But to achieve a green revolution for the twenty-first century, the world must move beyond stale and divisive discussions about which countries are responsible for the climate threat. Given today’s geopolitical rivalries, efforts to strengthen multilateral cooperation on climate change are likely to be futile. But competitive technological progress, even if promoted by protectionist policies, could save the planet.

The IRS is a climate agency now. The massive climate and energy law enacted by Democrats in August puts the IRS at the forefront of the effort to incentivize renewable energy across the economy. Of the nearly $370 billion of climate spending in the new law, about $270 billion will be delivered through tax incentives for electric vehicles, energy-efficient buildings, solar power and other “clean” energy technologies. That means the success of the law — and the Biden administration’s ability to achieve its climate goals — will hinge in part on the work of a beleaguered agency that’s sprinting to staff up as it implements the new law. But Republicans are already campaigning against an emboldened IRS, and they’ve pledged that slashing its funding will be a top priority if they take control on Capitol Hill next year. “The IRS is at the center of it because the way that you get this cash that the federal government has basically earmarked for all these things is through tax credits and benefits that you get when you file your tax return,” said Lauren Collins, a partner at Vinson & Elkins LLP who specializes in renewable energy. This isn’t totally uncharted territory for the IRS, which has long been central to the government’s efforts to subsidize favored industries and energy types through the tax code, Collins said. What’s different this time is the massive scale of federal investments under the law Democrats have dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act. “It has taken what we’ve always done and just hyped it up, turned the dial up to 11,” Collins said. “Now we have tax benefits for a gazillion different renewable technologies, climate-benefiting programs, green manufacturing, domestic manufacturing, electric vehicles, the list goes on.” The IRS and its parent agency — the Treasury Department — are hustling to put policies in place so businesses and consumers can understand and take advantage of them. “I am proud that the Treasury Department will be at the forefront of implementing our economic and climate plan,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a September speech at a North Carolina solar company. “We’re committed to ensuring that as many eligible taxpayers as possible get credits provided by law, while carefully protecting against fraud and abuse,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told reporters earlier this month. It’s a big new workload at an agency reeling from budget and staffing cuts in recent years. The IRS’s budget in 2021 was 19 percent below what it was in 2010, when adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The agency’s staff was reduced by about 22 percent during that time. The IRS has struggled to answer phone calls and efficiently process tax returns, according to a June report released by an independent watchdog within the agency. During the 2022 filing season, the IRS received about 73 million telephone calls, the report said. Only one in 10 of those calls reached an IRS employee. Democrats are attempting to revitalize the IRS with an infusion of new cash under the Inflation Reduction Act. The new legislation gives the IRS about $80 billion over the next decade for expenses like enforcement and taxpayer assistance. The cash influx was welcome news for the agency. IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig said in August that the new law marks a “transformational moment” for the agency, which “has struggled for many years with insufficient resources to fulfill our important mission.” Rettig, a Trump appointee, is nearing the end of his five-year term heading the IRS, and Biden could soon name a replacement, causing a leadership change at the agency that employs about 80,000 staffers. Meanwhile, Republicans have seized on the specter of a beefed-up IRS to campaign against Democrats in this fall’s midterm elections. If they’re successful in winning control of the House or the Senate, they would gain more power to investigate the IRS and its role in implementing the climate law. They would also have more leverage to try to slash the agency’s funding during budget negotiations. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) warned that the new law “hires an army of 87,000 IRS agents to harass working Americans.” McCarthy also said that if Republicans win the House, their first piece of legislation would be a bill to repeal the $80 billion in new IRS funding. The administration and its allies accuse the GOP of spreading misinformation about its plans to staff up the IRS. Some of the GOP claims are “outlandish and even irresponsible and dangerous,” said Seth Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who served in the Obama White House National Economic Council. Yellen has promised to use new funding to improve customer service at the IRS. Adeyemo said earlier this month that much of the new money will help to restock personnel lost over recent decades and to replace retiring staffers. A major chunk of the cash, he said, will go toward modernizing outdated technologies. “That will allow us to provide benefits to individuals but also to companies better going forward,” Adeyemo said. “And the first area of focus is going to be on these climate provisions.”

Today marks the beginning of tax filing season—the annual period during which Americans file their tax returns. The tax dollars collected by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) each year enable the federal government to serve the American people by providing essential services and benefits. From the Social Security payments that support our seniors to paying and protecting our troops to the climate investments that will help us transition to a net-zero economy, the IRS’s ability to collect revenue undergirds the provision of the services on which all Americans depend. The IRS has faced significant challenges in recent years, driven by chronic underinvestment in its people and technology and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, the IRS has been unable to answer the high volume of taxpayer phone calls they receive, and families and businesses have seen their refunds delayed due to slow processing. Despite these challenges, IRS employees have continued to rise to the occasion, delivering economic lifelines to hundreds of millions of families and small businesses that kept people afloat during the depths of the pandemic. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has provided long-term resources to tackle these challenges head-on. Thanks to President Biden, the IRA provides additional funding to modernize the IRS—to hire the staff needed to give Americans the level of service they deserve and to build the technology and systems needed to deliver a swift and seamless tax experience. Of course, these changes will not take place overnight. Due to chronic underfunding, the IRS’s workforce remains the same size as it was in the 1970s, and the agency has fewer auditors than at any time since World War II. At the same time, the U.S. population has increased by more than 100 million since 1970, and the economy and tax code have only grown in complexity. What’s more, the IRS’s technology relies on a programming language that was created in the 1960s. Fully rebuilding the IRS will take time. Some of these changes, however, are already underway and will result in noticeable improvements for Americans during this year’s filing season. Together, these reforms will result in faster processing of returns and quicker distributions of the credits and benefits that are vital to so many Americans. To start, we’ve hired 5,000 new customer service staff to answer the IRS’s phones and help ensure taxpayers get the help they need. The IRS answered too small a share of the total number of calls they received last year. These 5,000 new hires will ensure that changes and help address the continued elevation of call volumes we’ve experienced over the past two years. Ultimately, when it comes to customer service, our goal is to ensure that taxpayers can get their questions answered by the IRS as quickly as possible. Last fall, Secretary Yellen set out a goal of an 85 percent level of service. In the past, the IRS has assessed its level of service using a metric that only captures calls answered by customer service representatives. But today, when you seek customer support from a company or business, you typically have the option to speak to a customer representative or use automated support if it will better meet your needs. The IRS has made significant improvements to its automated services in recent years and now gives taxpayers the same option—offering automated phone and chat support, as well as live phone assistance. We look forward to serving millions of taxpayers with these automated options, and one way we will measure our ability to meet taxpayers’ needs is by looking at the overall level of service provided by our customer service representatives and automated support systems together. The IRS will continue to report data on the number of phone calls answered by customer service representatives, as well as data on automated assistance. We’ve also taken steps to fully staff the Taxpayer Assistance Centers that provide in-person support to Americans nationwide. These 361 centers located across the country offer free tax help—to address complex tax questions that may be challenging for individuals or small businesses to handle on their own, to help tax filers without a Social Security Number apply for an Individual Tax Identification Number, or to assist those who may face a language barrier in filing their taxes. As of December, the IRS had hired or selected nearly 650 additional people to provide support to the American people at Taxpayer Assistance Centers this filing season. In addition, more than 100 Taxpayer Assistance Centers nationwide will host monthly Taxpayer Experience Days to provide face-to-face help on Saturdays—when most taxpayers’ schedules allow them to visit these centers. Overall, we are on track to meet Secretary Yellen’s goal to triple the number of Americans served at these centers. These in-person sessions are a vital service for many taxpayers—especially low-income households—helping them receive benefits they count on and for which they are eligible, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and many others. We have also made meaningful progress in streamlining the ways that taxpayers are able to respond to notices from the IRS. In the past, when taxpayers received an IRS notice for things like documentation verification, they had to respond via mail—there was no electronic option. Today, that is no longer the case. Last year, the IRS set an ambitious goal to create an online response option for seven of the most common notices that taxpayers receive. They will exceed that goal at the end of this month, with online response capability available for ten of these notices and more to come as technology improvements are implemented. The ability to respond to notices online is not the only place where we’ve taken steps to move the IRS into the 21st century. The IRS will soon roll out a new digital option for small business owners filing 1099 forms. Millions of small business owners prepare their own taxes, rather than hiring professional tax preparers. We have consistently heard from this group that online filing for 1099s will make a meaningful difference for them, saving time and money. In addition, the IRS is moving forward with plans to automate the scanning of individual paper returns, turning them into native digital copies at the outset of the filing process. Since Secretary Yellen’s promise to automate this process last fall, the IRS has successfully initiated the work to scan nearly 100,000 returns and is working to expand this program to address a large number of the paper returns sent to the IRS every year. Finally, we’re proud that in the U.S., we have a system where the vast majority of people pay their taxes. However, the IRS has historically lacked the resources to effectively audit wealthy and high-income individuals, whose audits are more complex and take more time. These individuals are responsible for a disproportionate share of unpaid taxes, depriving the American public of funds needed to pay vital services and benefits. In total, the gap between taxes owed and taxes paid stands at roughly $600 billion every year; the top 1 percent alone account for $160 billion of this gap, nearly 30 percent. The IRA will help to change that, providing the IRS funding for the tools and personnel needed to go after wealthy tax cheats and ensure they pay their fair share. At the same time, Secretary Yellen has directed that these resources will not be used to raise audit rates for households making less than $400,000, relative to historical levels. Of course, our work is far from over. The resources provided by the IRA will support a top-to-bottom modernization and transformation of the IRS that will continue long after this filing season. But even in the five months since the IRA’s passage, we have made meaningful progress toward our goals that will result in tangible improvements for taxpayers this filing season.

Reviving America’s strategic position in the world in the wake of President Donald Trump will require a foreign policy that both firmly embraces democratic values and systematically pushes back against authoritarian competitors such as Russia and China. The Trump presidency has already severely undercut the United States’ global standing, causing immense harm to the nation’s strategic position, credibility, and moral authority. Allies are losing faith in American leadership while illiberal regimes are growing in number, stature, and audacity. Trump’s rise reflects a pre-existing deterioration in the vitality of democratic systems, a global phenomenon which his presidency has now turned into a crisis. The damage cannot be reversed simply by electing a different president or reverting to previous foreign policy approaches. Instead, the United States must adopt bold new policies to regain the advantage in great power competition and help vulnerable democracies, including its own, resist authoritarian influence and strengthen a growing global democratic community. This report explains why a democratic values-based foreign policy is the right choice for the United States on both a strategic and moral level. It also offers specific policy recommendations as a roadmap for how the next administration could pursue a democratic values-based foreign policy. Today, democracy is under strain in America and threatened across the globe. The spread of democratic governance, which for decades seemed all but inevitable, has stalled and now faces serious setbacks. Across the democratic world, ordinary people have lost trust in their institutions of government and delivered stunning rebukes to their political establishments. These setbacks have also emboldened authoritarian regimes. Russia, China, and other illiberal states have sought to exploit the openness of democratic societies for their geopolitical advantage and have put forward an alternative autocratic model for politics and economic development that undermines liberal democratic values. America’s enduring security, prosperity, and strength depend on the survival and success of democracy—both at home and abroad—as well as on the resilience of institutions, rules, and norms that protect the liberal democratic values on which the United States’ global standing is built. Yet at the very moment when liberal democracy faces its greatest ideological challenge since the Cold War, President Trump has chosen to reject America’s historic role as leader of the world’s democracies. He has treated democratic allies as ideological foes and murderous dictators as respected friends and equals while stoking nativist and isolationist impulses among the American people. President Trump has also systematically denigrated democratic values and norms at home through unprecedented attacks on the press, the independent judiciary, and law enforcement, as well as political purges of civil servants.1 While U.S. democratic institutions have shown resilience in the face of his challenges, it is already clear that some of the damage Trump does will outlast his presidency. The critical question today is whether the United States after Trump will summon the resolve to lead, protect, and expand the world’s democracies or stand by and suffer the consequences as autocracy and illiberalism crack the foundations of the American-led global system. Advancing a values-based foreign policy after Trump will inevitably invite a vigorous debate over how—or even whether—values should factor into U.S. foreign policy. Critics will likely point to America’s prior foreign policy errors and shortcomings, for example, the use of democracy promotion aims to justify misguided foreign policies such as the invasion of Iraq; the broader U.S. failure to promote democracy in the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring; and Cold War-era support for dictators who sided against the Soviet Union. Critics may also point to the urgency of domestic challenges relative to foreign policy ones or fear of U.S. overextension abroad to argue that a values-based foreign policy is unwise or simply not possible. This report takes these critiques seriously. However, in reflecting on the stakes for U.S. leadership, present and future, it arrives at the conclusion that an American foreign policy shorn of American values would ultimately deliver less security and prosperity at home, while making U.S. leadership in the world less sustainable and impactful. This report asserts that an approach that embraces America’s core democratic values will allow the United States to compete more effectively with authoritarian powers such as China and Russia and will deliver better results for the country in the long haul. To address setbacks abroad, the United States will need to pursue a new foreign policy that systematically puts liberal democratic values at the center of its engagement with the world. This will require more than just lip service. It will entail a meaningful, sustained shift in how the United States conducts its foreign relations, launched with quick and decisive action and sustained with persistence and strategic vision. A democratic values-based foreign policy strategy is rooted in faith in democratic self-government, not just as being better than all the alternatives but also as a value in and of itself. Such a foreign policy will also advance U.S. national interests. America’s presence as a prosperous, multi-ethnic, free democratic society poses a challenge to autocrats through the model it sets. Instead of taking this power for granted, it is time for America to cultivate it. At the heart of such an effort should be a realignment of American foreign policy to meet the challenge posed by resurgent illiberalism. This can be done by forging stronger cooperation among democratic states, including in the defense of democracies under assault and the expansion of the global democratic space. In both the short- and long-term, the United States will need to take the following steps: Restore democratic values and norms at home. Work with democratic allies to design and implement a counter-authoritarian playbook to push back against the encroachment on and abuse of the open systems of democratic states. Build stronger international networks of democracies to create a global democratic bulwark. Privilege U.S. relationships with democracies, and reflect this in U.S. policy decisions and spending. Strengthen international support mechanisms for populations nonviolently mobilizing for democracy around the world, while more systematically pressuring countries to uphold human rights and adhere to international law. Reorienting U.S. foreign policy toward a values-based approach will require policymakers to take the long view, recognize the intrinsic strength of democratic governance, and acknowledge that the best way to advance democracy worldwide is through the example set by successful democracies. Critically, it will also require U.S. leaders to heed the lessons of history by recognizing that the most effective way to promote and sustain democracy is supporting and encouraging democratic institutions and movements, rather than employing coercive measures. The United States has numerous tools to vigorously defend its values and advance democracy without seeking to impose it using force. Some may fear that a values-based foreign policy would come at the expense of traditional U.S. interests. But that critique misdiagnoses and underestimates the geopolitical challenge to U.S. interests that a rising illiberal tide presents. American interests will be far more difficult to secure if liberal democracy is supplanted as the pre-eminent and most sought-after political system. There will inevitably be times when U.S. interests will necessitate partnering with nondemocratic regimes. Still, a principled but pragmatic approach can do both: cooperate selectively with such regimes on matters of vital national interest while also recognizing that the greatest strategic gains to U.S. security and prosperity will rest on the success of other democracies and that America’s staying power and strategic resilience will depend on investing in them. The challenge: A democracy crisis at home and abroad For most of the past 50 years, the world has witnessed the dramatic spread of democratic governance throughout the globe. Between 1970 and 2010, the number of democratic states nearly tripled, with transitions to democracy stretching from the southern cone of South America to West Africa, Southeast Asia, and the former Soviet bloc.2 By 2000, more than half the world’s population lived under a democratic government for the first time in recorded history.3 This democratic wave brought a host of political and social rights to hundreds of millions of people and coincided with a historic decline in the incidence of interstate wars.4 The ascendance of democracy globally and the emergence of an increasingly robust set of international rules and institutions fostered a prevailing assumption that a more democratic world was here to stay: Democratic states would prosper and more autocratic states would transition to democracy. But this optimism about democracy has waned due to a number of varying and reinforcing trends. First, democracies have experienced setbacks. Many countries once held up as examples of democratic progress—such as Poland, Turkey, and Venezuela—have experienced a deterioration in rule of law and electoral competitiveness.5 In other countries, such as Thailand and Egypt, democratically elected governments were overthrown by force. Meanwhile, across the Middle East, the democratic promise of the Arab Spring faltered in the face of violent repression. During this same period, illiberal and insular populist movements became resurgent in many established democracies, weakening international cooperation among democratic states and imperiling many of the achievements of the postwar era. These movements occurred most notably in the European Union, where a Center for American Progress and American Enterprise Institute study found that “in the past decade, such parties have moved from the margins of Europe’s political landscape to its core.”6 A key feature of this illiberal resurgence has been elected leaders’ use of strongman tactics to undermine democratic institutions and norms. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has gained increasing control over the political, economic, and military aspects of the Turkish state.7 In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has used xenophobic rhetoric and crony capitalism to erode political checks and balances and consolidate power.8 Poland’s current leaders and others have followed Orbán’s playbook, attacking the independence of the country’s media and judiciary and campaigning on an exclusionary vison of Polish society.9 President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, meanwhile, has flaunted his disdain for the rule of law and human rights as he pursues a campaign of mass violence against drug users and dealers, which has included state sponsorship of extrajudicial killings.10 In all of these cases, attacks on democratic institutions and norms have been carried out by democratically elected leaders themselves.11 Even in the United States, President Donald Trump is showing signs of authoritarian envy, regularly criticizing the media, the judiciary, and law enforcement, while openly admiring some of the world’s most brutal dictators. As Trump said of Kim Jong Un, who rules over a totalitarian dictatorship where people are thrown into labor camps for criticizing the government: “He’s the head of the country, and I mean he’s the strong head. … Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”12 These trends do not mean in any way that democracy is a lost cause or that the global tilt toward illiberalism is irreversible. Demand for democratic change and greater civil and political rights remains a potent force that transcends culture and geography, as recent events in countries as diverse as Burkina Faso, Armenia, and Malaysia illustrate.13 But these positive developments do not negate the democratic backsliding that has occurred elsewhere. Across the world, democracy faces an uncertain future. Second, confidence in democratic politics has waned, even in states with long traditions of representative government. In the past two decades, democracies have struggled to deliver economic results for their people. Even democracies that have experienced rapid growth have too often seen it disproportionally benefit small elites or specific regions, while causing significant disruption elsewhere in society.14 The Great Recession of 2008 and years of painfully slow recovery helped fuel a sharp decline in trust in government institutions across the democratic world.15 Stagnation and deepening inequality, coupled with demographic change and political dysfunction, have created fertile ground for distrust, division, and demagoguery that illiberal populist parties have exploited. These groups draw on xenophobic and racist messaging but also resentment at economic stagnation and elite capture of supposedly democratic institutions. In some cases, they have also made both subtle and overt appeals to authoritarian modes of governance.16 The United States has not been immune to this democratic malaise. Americans today distrust their government in greater numbers than at any point in modern U.S. history, including the height of the Vietnam War and during the Watergate scandal.17 Two of the most significant drivers of distrust have been the rise of unfettered special interest spending to distort U.S. politics and the political paralysis that has arisen from the growth of counter-majoritarian practices such as gerrymandering and abuse of the legislative filibuster.18 These problems have fed a widespread perception that the U.S. political system no longer represents the interests of ordinary Americans nor does it address grave challenges such as inequality, racial injustice, and opioid addiction. Such failures, compounded by foreign policy failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, have contributed to a profound loss of faith in American institutions that Donald Trump effectively channeled in his bid for the presidency. Third, illiberal and authoritarian regimes have sought to encourage and exploit the crisis of confidence in democratic states in order to weaken them from within, assert the superiority of their own models, and attack the foundations of the post-Cold War geopolitical order. Of these revisionist states, Russia has been the most overt and aggressive in its challenge to liberal democracy. Despite a stagnating economy and shrinking population, Moscow has launched ambitious measures to reestablish a sphere of influence in nearby countries, fueled right- and left-wing populist movements across Europe and North America, and sowed confusion and discord among the democratic citizenries of EU states and NATO members, including America.19 The tools it has deployed in this campaign include disinformation operations using both traditional and social media; targeted use of corruption to cultivate political proxies; cyberespionage aimed at influencing electoral outcomes; covert funding of insurgent political movements; and exploitation of neighbors’ energy insecurity.20 Together, Russian tactics constitute a new authoritarian playbook to which the United States and other democratic powers have yet to develop an effective response.21 If Russia has been the boldest challenger, the most serious long-term external threat to democratic governance comes from China. Beijing has been—and will almost certainly remain—an essential partner of the United States in solving major global challenges, from climate change to nonproliferation. But as China amasses power, too often it has put its newfound capabilities and immense resources behind a model of political and economic development and interstate cooperation that neither requires nor encourages liberal democratic values.22 In fact, China’s full-throated assertion of narrow national interests in areas such as internet governance, free speech, trade, and human rights often actively undermines democratic values.23 China has also sought to use economic coercion to undermine U.S. security alliances and partnerships in the Asia-Pacific region and erode cohesion among EU member states.24 Meanwhile, Beijing has used its economic and growing military might to immunize itself from the consequences of flouting long-standing international principles such as freedom of navigation.25 Tragically, these developments coincide with President Trump’s abandonment of America’s commitments to global leadership, including the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate agreement, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Fourth, the institutions, rules, and norms that underpin the liberal international order have not lived up to expectations, providing space for illiberal and undemocratic states to seize the advantage. The global and regional organizations established since World War II were built to protect and encourage liberal values, including universal human rights and rules-based international conduct. But these institutions largely reflect the world of 1945 and have not been adequately updated to recognize the massive shifts in global economic and political power. Today, many of these institutions are losing the capacity to perform their basic missions because of inherent structural flaws, outdated mechanisms, and deliberate efforts by world powers to undermine or circumvent them. The U.N. Security Council is rarely able to meaningfully respond to gross abuses of human rights or even outright aggression.26 The United States and other democracies face growing challenges in upholding international rules or solving big problems such as chemical weapons use in Syria, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, China’s violations of international law in the South China Sea, and Russia’s use of gray-zone tactics in Ukraine. The World Trade Organization has likewise struggled to address abuses of its trade rules by states such as China.27 Without more effective and coordinated efforts to push back against these abuses and transgressions, authoritarian governments will continue to probe the boundaries of international rules and norms in ways contrary to both U.S. values and interests. Fifth, economic globalization has exposed autocratic systems to democratic values, but it has also exposed democratic systems to autocratic influence. As the globalization of the world economy accelerated in the 1990s, experts assumed that integration would result in a more liberal future.28 Authoritarian states, once closed, would be opened up and exposed to the practices and values of liberal democratic states. Gradually, these autocratic states would begin to take on more liberal characteristics, accelerating the trend toward greater democratization. But globalization has proved to be a two-way street. Liberal states have also been exposed to the influence of authoritarian states. Foreign investment from autocratic regimes has served as a vehicle to influence their recipients, most notably in the form of Russian cultivation of political actors across Eastern Europe.29 The corrupt and uncompetitive inducements of autocrats have at times proved a more attractive path than more transparent business and investment practices favored by democracies.30 The immense wealth concentration in autocratic states—and liberal ones as well—has spawned a complex transnational network of illicit finance that has distorted both developed and developing economies.31 Lastly, the Trump administration is now undermining the democratic values and international rules the United States has traditionally sought to uphold. Although the challenges facing global democracy have been building for many years, they have accelerated since 2016 in part because of the policies and rhetoric of the current occupant of the Oval Office. In a remarkably short period of time, President Trump has taken dramatic steps to abandon America’s long-standing moral leadership in the world. President Trump’s first secretary of state publicly declared that the United States would not prioritize human rights.32 The Trump administration has vigorously attacked America’s democratic allies while showing an affinity for autocrats and dictators.33 On an almost daily basis, the president makes clear his disregard for many long-standing norms of American government, such as separation of personal and public interests and respect for the autonomy of the judiciary and law enforcement. While in the past American foreign policy has been prone to charges of hypocrisy—such as claiming to uphold democracy while backing autocrats—the Trump administration has abandoned any pretense of concern for democratic values. This sharp shift in America’s approach to the world under President Trump has been immensely destabilizing in ways that are only beginning to become clear.34 The answer: A democratic values-based foreign policy Donald Trump is hardly the only skeptic of a democratic values-based foreign policy. A range of policymakers and scholars of foreign policy, including some progressives, have argued that the United States should de-prioritize the promotion of democratic values in its foreign policy. Some make the argument that the United States needs to take a more hardheaded and transactional approach to advance its security and economic interests. However, this report argues that not only are these false choices but that the United States should see democratic values as a U.S. comparative advantage—and not a weakness—in global competition. America’s liberal democratic values have been key to building, enhancing, and sustaining America’s geopolitical power. With the global backsliding of democracy and the rise of alternative authoritarian models, it is ever more urgent to rediscover the power of core American values to secure U.S. interests in the long term. A democratic values-based foreign policy is worth pursuing for three key reasons. First, it will advance long-term U.S. economic and security interests abroad and create a safer and more prosperous world. Compared with authoritarian regimes, democracies are less likely to go to war against each other, less likely to ally against the United States, less likely to sponsor terrorism, less likely to experience famine or produce refugees, and more likely to adopt market economies and form economic partnerships with other democracies.35 Since liberal democracies tend to share values rooted in rule of law, fair competition, and transparency, they are natural partners in promoting the stable, prosperous, open, and peaceful international environment that the United States ought to cultivate through its foreign policy. It is true that the process of democratization can be long and uneven and can sometimes produce destabilizing and aggressive state behavior. However, mature and established democracies are more stable, peaceful, and prosperous, and more full-fledged democracies mean more economic and security benefits for the United States.36 Furthermore, the global system of democratic alliances, institutions, and norms the United States helped create and lead after World War II has improved material conditions and brought peace and prosperity to hundreds of millions of people across the world. Bolstering that democratic system and the democratic values that underpin it will ensure that future generations can also enjoy the fruits of democracy and a liberal world. Second, this kind of foreign policy will help secure an American advantage in great power competition by advancing a compelling alternative and strengthening the global democratic bulwark. Although the challenge posed by illiberal regimes today has evolved since the Cold War, there are still lessons to be drawn from that era. One of the most significant factors in the collapse of the Soviet Union was the powerful example and contrast set by flourishing democratic societies in the United States and Europe. Today, one of America’s greatest strategic assets is its global network of democratic allies and partners. The power of that democratic network, even underutilized as it is today, stands in stark contrast to what today’s illiberal and authoritarian regimes can offer: namely, political order purchased at the cost of extreme corruption, xenophobia, oligarchy, and arbitrary use of state power. To succeed, any approach to countering the authoritarian playbook must present a compelling alternative. This means that the United States, alongside its democratic allies and partners, must demonstrate that liberal democracy represents the best path to deliver inclusive prosperity, rule of law, and a just and equal society to a country’s citizens.

With the 2022 tax season now officially over, many taxpayers are facing an unusual problem. The Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. federal tax collection agency, has warned filers of significant delays in processing federal tax refunds because of ongoing funding and personnel cutbacks at the agency. While most Americans rarely give much thought to the IRS, this year’s even slower customer service is likely to cause widespread dissatisfaction. Lukewarm public support for the IRS is nothing new. But research finds that continuing negative attitudes toward the agency could exacerbate a second ongoing problem: a steep decline in the IRS’s ability to enforce the tax code and collect revenue from tax cheats. Two things might boost public support for the IRS: information about its underfunding and appeals to Republicans’ and Democrats’ core values. That increased support might push Congress to invest in the U.S. central tax authority. Here’s what our research says. Why support for the IRS matters Political scientists find that a lack of support for central tax agencies is remarkably bad for democracy. The IRS plays a key role in supporting what social scientists call “state capacity,” or the U.S. ability to run a functioning government. Without the IRS collecting taxes and enforcing the tax code, the U.S. federal government would very quickly collapse into total dysfunction.

So last week, you may recall we heard from some Bloomberg tax reporters about what the IRS has on its to do list for 2023. We're going to stay on that theme this week. But this time we'll be hearing not from journalists, but from a tax professional. Niles elder is a member at the firm Caplin and Drysdale past chair of a committee at the ABA tax section, and a fellow at the American College of tax counsel, he's keeping a close eye on the $80 billion infusion of cash that the IRS will be receiving, and what that will mean for taxpayers, Elbert spoke with Bloomberg taxes, Jeff Leon about how the new aggressively funded IRS will behave in 2023, he gets to what he thinks will happen in a bit, but first announced talks about what he hopes will happen, you know, what we want, particularly, you know, I think those of us who, you know, spend our lives dealing with the services that they're able to stick to their core mission, and not get sidetracked as they have in recent years by having to administer social programs, you know, there was the PPP loans, child tax credit payments, etcetera. That's my hopes, what might actually happen, the first thing that, you know, I would expect to see at the service is hiring, the ranks of the IRS top to bottom are severely depleted, you don't have enough revenue agents, you don't have enough appeals officers, you don't have enough revenue officers, you don't have enough special agents. And you certainly don't have enough, you know, customer service personnel that's impacted every aspect of the agency. IRS knows this. They've been begging for funds for many years now. So that's the first thing, you know, part and parcel, Jeff, with hiring comes training. I don't know exactly what the numbers are. But there's been a significant depletion of seasoned IRS employees who were working with, you know, the agency for many years, they're gone. So, you know, I would certainly anticipate there's going to be a lot of that happening in 2023. In addition to that, the IRS has been beaten over the head, about, you know, the lack of customer service, almost at every level, you know, they're processing issues, there have been just pure communication issues. It's incredibly difficult, unfortunately, to get in touch, you know, with a customer service rep when you have a problem. And then along with that, you've probably heard, because it's certainly no secret that there's a tremendous backlog of unprocessed tax returns. And so the service, you know, in order to sort of get back on its feet needs to take care of those unprocessed returns. Yeah, so there's a lot of things that are going on right there. So what do you feel is the mindsets at the IRS right now, especially with the promise of new money and stuff like that? I mean, how do you feel that they're approaching things now? Well, again, this goes back to the beginning, my hope versus wants, Jeff, now, I say this, you know, fully well, knowing right now you have an Acting Commissioner, Chuck Reddick, who was the former commissioner stepped down in November, we have, you know, an Acting Commissioner. And you know, just in terms, at least in my experience, in terms of trying to run a large organization, and, you know, the politics that come into play, particularly with respect to this government agency, it will certainly help to get a confirmed Commissioner. But still, since you don't know how long you know, it might take to get confirmation to go through the organization, I would certainly suspect is doing a substantial amount of strategic planning. It is a tremendous amount of money. And you've got to figure out how to get the most bang for your buck. So you can't rush into anything. I am hoping that they are doing substantial strategic planning, and part and parcel with you know, trenches trying to figure out how to get the most bang for your buck is how also to get the best talent possible. And one of the downsides, you know, to having obviously to administer a government agency is that you can be challenged in terms of the the resources and the funds that you have available to bring in the talent that you would want it Jeff, it is paramount. We hear about it every day on TV on radio. There's so much contention about, you know, the way the IRS operates, if you want to tamp that down so that the service can focus on its core mission. That And the service needs to show competency. They need to be able to get particularly the politicians in Congress to back down. Now, that is a very high hurdle, to be sure. But that's what they need to do. And they can do it by showing competency. I mean, again, because of the political issues that are going on, on Capitol Hill, you know, there are already efforts to undercut the annual budget. And, you know, there's the direct way of attacking it, by passing laws that, you know, would reduce that funding, but there's a sort of the indirect way of doing it, which is, you know, by just underfunding in the, you know, annual budget. So, you know, they're gonna have to make sure that they're showing that this, you know, this amount of money that's been allocated to them, is used as effectively as possible. And yes, most definitely, it'll be interesting to see what happens in the coming year, especially when it comes to money when it comes to what's the what happens next, and what is going on with Congress as well. But I'm taking a step back from the IRS, looking at the tax world a little bit more broadly, what do you feel will be the big tax trends in 2023? You know, I think it's probably, you know, going to be very much driven by what the IRS, you know, decides to do, we're looking at, you know, in an economy that potentially, you know, goes into recession, when that happens, you know, it certainly impacts, you know, the way the tax system functions, you know, then isn't necessarily, although I can't say that, you know, tax planning ever necessarily stops, if people aren't looking to, you know, try and find a way to offset or reduce your income or gains, then, you know, tax planning itself, can, you know, ratchet down, you know, there's not an insignificant amount of litigation, you know, that's going on right now, that may have some impact on various aspects of the tax system. And take, for instance, say, you know, taxation or reporting of offshore assets. There's a big case at the Supreme Court right now, this is Bitner case, where the court is going to have to decide in the case of a non willful violation of the F bar rules, what the appropriate, you know, penalty is going to be is also a lot of litigation going on, in the area of the Administrative Procedure Act, the IRS tends to do a lot of regulation by notice, as opposed to actually issuing, you know, regulations that, you know, might be required by statute. So, I mean, I think that's going to be something we haven't seen. They're always tax cases in a tax court. You know, it's fairly busy. But I'm not sure that we've seen the volume of significant, you know, cases, I think that we're seeing right now that, you know, would we have a real impact on the way the tax system operates? Crypto, notwithstanding the fact that cryptocurrencies have taken a bit of a hit, I would say probably over the last six months, it certainly seems that they're here to stay. More and more businesses are, you know, accepting of them, more and more investors are using or acquiring. And so, you know, is the current treatment that cryptocurrencies property? Is that really going to be the long term position? If it changes, then you have to shift gears? So, those are certainly trends that I think we're going to see, you know, in 2023, that, you know, are going to be important to large numbers of taxpayers, and, you know, they're important to taxpayers are certainly going to be important to the government, you know, as well, looking towards the New Year and everything like that. Is there anything else that you'd like to mention that maybe we haven't covered? Well, I mean, I think, you know, we can talk just about enforcement. For a moment, Jeff enforcement is incredibly important aspect of the tax system. I may be a tax lawyer, I may be a controversial or I may defend people who didn't pay their taxes. It doesn't mean I don't believe that everybody should pay their fair share, so that the system properly operates now, there are certain steps the service has to take before it really is fully functioning. So you know what we're going to see in what's going to hit the news particularly the tax break, it's going to be things like the conservation easement cases, or captive insurance arrangements or promoter examine nations which go hand in hand with one another, the service is going to want to make, you know headlines where it can't with crypto related type criminal cases. And, again, they've been pushing for a while employment tax cases, and I don't expect there's going to be, you know, any let down, they're going back to, again, my theme of Hope versus wants, it would be nice to see the service in a real way, move back towards domestic legal source type tax cases, we're talking about scams, embezzlement, just sort of garden variety fraud, because you don't see a lot of that, and when it goes unchecked, you know, people will do what they will do, they will continue to go after, you know, tax preparers in criminal cases. Because, you know, for every tax preparer who's investigated, prosecuted, and ended up going to prison, there are 1000s, often 1000s and 1000s of individual taxpayers, who no longer have, you know, a means of under paying their taxes, offshore enforcement remains a priority, I think we'll still see a fair bit of that. And then, you know, there are a number of other things that, you know, the service really has to move on to because, you know, for every aggressive tax strategy that they're dealing with, now, there are, you know, several others that are still, you know, sort of flying under the radar that first got to find and then they've got to find a way to address it, they're looking at multiple pension plans, and we're looking at Puerto Rico act 22 cases and, you know, a more than a handful of other, you know, aggressive, you know, planning structures. And so, you know, we're gonna see them make efforts, but, you know, in the, in the concept of, you walk before you run, they've got to get the hiring done. They've got to get the training done. They've got to clean up their act, and then, you know, they can move into other areas, and, you know, try and, you know, bring the IRS and the system along. That was Caplin, and Drysdale is Niles Elber. Speaking with Bloomberg tax reporter Jeff Lyon. And that's it for today's podcast. You can find up to the newest and latest tax and accounting developments at our website news dot Bloomberg tax.com. That website once again is news that Bloomberg tax.com. Today's talking tax was produced by myself, David Schultz. Rachel Daigle is our editor and executive producer is Josh block from Washington. I'm David Schultz. Thanks for listening.

A current – and recurring – topic of conversation in the SFF writer/ blogger/ reader community is the lack of people of color (POC) writing and publishing in the field.  (This is also an issue in the literary community in general; here’s a recent  that appeared on the Book Riot website.)

People of color are underrepresented in SFF for a lot of reasons, but one which I see frequently mentioned is that books without diversity make POC feel excluded.  This creates a vicious circle – POC don’t read SFF, so they don’t write SFF, so there aren’t POC in SFF books, so POC don’t read SFF.  One way to break the cycle is for white writers to include more diversity in their own work.

The world of speculative fiction publishing is plagued by “structural, institutional, personal, universal” racism, according to a new report that found less than 2% of more than 2,000 SF stories published last year were by black writers.

The report, published by the magazine Fireside Fiction, states that just 38 of the 2,039 stories published in 63 magazines in 2015 were by black writers. With the bulk of the industry based in the US, more than half of all speculative fiction publications the report considered did not publish a single original story by a black author. “The probability that it is random chance that only 1.96% of published writers are black in a country where 13.2% of the population is black is 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000321%,” says the report.

(Dr. Ebony Elizabeth - professor in Literacy, Culture, and International Education at the University of Pennsylvania, “Toward a Theory of the Dark Fantastic: The Role of Racial Difference in Young Adult Speculative Fiction and Media,” Journal of Language and Literacy Education Vol. 14 Issue 1—Spring 2018, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1175839.pdf)

In the West, the mysterious unknowability of darkness in nature was extended to a corresponding fear of unknown and unknowable dark things, including imaginary monsters beyond the boundaries of the known world during medieval times, and, in the modern period, conquered and enslaved people from beyond Europe’s borders. This fear of dark people was written into the United States constitution, denoting for the ages a “threefifths compromise” that at the time of the Founding and well beyond, enslaved African Americans were not fully human. The colloquial term by which people of African descent were often known during pronouns to refer to individuals that correspond with the pronouns that they use to refer to themselves. H Journal of Language and Literacy Education Vol. 14 Issue 1—Spring 2018 3 this late 18th century period—darky—signals that in modern English, darkness has never been just a metaphor. Even in language, darkness is personified, embodied, and most assuredly racialized. My quest to seek the origins of fantastic darkness within history, culture, and society is part of a long intellectual tradition. Critical medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (1996) frequently cited edited volume Monster Theory is but one of many influential texts that views fantastic beasts, witches, zombies, vampires, dragons, manticores, shades, and the rest of a monstrous menagerie as an analogy for those who are positioned as different in the real world. Cohen’s seven theses of monster culture echoed some of the observations that I began making as I read text after text. Furthermore, Toni Morrison’s (2010) Playing in the Dark provides an even better starting point for locating the Dark Other in the fantastic, especially when many traditional fantasy novels, fairy tales, comics, television shows, and movies seem not to have any discernible characters of color: The situation is aggravated by the tremor that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference. To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. According to this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse. (pp. 9-10; emphasis in original) In other words, the reason why our culture does not often notice the ways that race, difference, and darkness are hailed in the fantastic is that we have been carefully taught not to notice it. The supposedly raceless terrain of the fantastic thus becomes a means of escape from our raced, embodied existences, even for White readers and viewers. However, enforced invisibility through colormuteness (Pollock, 2004)in the fantastic does not render dark bodies shadowless. Quite the contrary. The shadow cast becomes darker and more ominous still for its very unspeakability. Beyond the magical landscapes of fantasy, stories set in the future and on alien worlds seem to uncannily imagine alien Others subjugating the West in the same way that Europe did to the “rest.” John Rieder (2008) observed in Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction that “scholars largely (though not universally) agree that the period of the most fervid imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth century is also the most crucial period for the emergence of the [science fiction]” (pp. 2-3). Science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tales for children and young adults are not exempt from colonial themes. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint (2012), quoting José Monleón, find that fantasy emerges from dialectics of reason and unreason that arose with modernity, dividing the world into “us” and “them” (p. 103). In the fantastic, vampires and werewolves, witches and wizards, and seers and shifters often function as recognizable stand-ins for majorities and minorities, and the inevitable conflicts that emerge between and among identity groups. Dark Others cross all of these boundaries—generic, categorical, and rhetorical — as embodied material sites of accumulation and fungibility. In my book manuscript in progress, I focus on textual narratives for young adults that have been turned into television shows and movies. It is one thing to read and imagine a character who is the site of difference; it is quite another to see that character on the small or large screen. Participatory culture also plays a role in this phenomenon. When Morrison asked rhetorically about what happens as we imagine “an Africanist Other,” she might not have foreseen that twenty years later, not only would fans run to social media to share their reactions after finishing a narrative, they would also use the Internet to discuss books and shows during readings and viewings. Thus reader, viewer, and fan responses are being shaped much more collectively than at any time in the recent past. And so is imagination. When people read fantastic texts from the perspective of the monster, not the protagonist, they find themselves in completely different terrain. Thus, rooted in both critical race theory and Afropessimism, the central claim that I am making about the dark fantastic is this: In the AngloAmerican fantastic tradition, the Dark Other is the monstrous Thing that is the root cause of hesitation, spectacle, and violence. The Dark Other is the present-absence that lingers at the edges of every fairy tale. She stalks the shadows of the futurist visions of science fiction, lurks along the margins of the imagined magical pasts of high fantasy, and renders the uchronia of alternate history into a nonsensical cipher. Perhaps what is most chilling is that even when those who are endarkened and Othered dream in the fantastic, the Dark Other is still the obstacle to be overcome. Even in stories where all of the characters are “White and blue-eyed” —recalling Adichie’s (2009) influential talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”—the Dark Other is always already there. When readers who are White, middle class, cisgender, heterosexual, and able-bodied enter the fantastic dream, they can be empowered and afforded a sense of transcendence that may be elusive within the real world. However, this perspective often means that the implicit message that readers, hearers, and viewers of color receive as we read these texts is that we are the villains. We are the horde. We are the enemies. We are the monster. For many readers, viewers, and fans of color, I suspect that at the level of consciousness, to participate in the fantastic is to watch yourself be slain (and justifiably so, as the story recounts). In fairy tales, you terrorized the hapless villagers, kidnapped the fair princess, dared wage war against the dashing hero. You are the jealous darker sister who wishes to steal the fair maiden’s pedestal for yourself. If you are present in the story at all, you are relegated to the margins. To watch a science fiction film is to learn that you have no future; there are only two or three people of color on most fictional spaceships. Very often, when you appear on the page or on the screen, you are a slave, a servant, or a prostitute— even your very body is not your own. If you have words, your speech serves only to support the narrative, never to subvert it. Rarely is the narrative focalized through your eyes. You are rendered abject. Fungible. Socially dead. You are the alien Other. You are the Orc. You are the fell beast. The very presence of the Dark Other in a text of speculative fiction (across genre and mode) creates a profound ontological dilemma. This dilemma is inescapable, for readers and for writers, and must be reconciled. This dilemma is most often resolved by enacting narrative violence against the Dark Other. This dilemma is what the readers and hearers of the fantastic expect, for it mirrors the unending spectacle of violence against the endarkened and the Othered in our own world. The fantastic has need of darkness, for these innocent “stories about stories” require both heroes and villains, fair princesses and evil crones, valiant steeds and nightmarish beasts. The fantastic requires Medusas and Grendels, chimaeras and manticores, cunning tricksters and cowardly fools. It needs the Dark Other as its source of hesitation, the very spectacle that causes the heart to skip in fear. It desires the Dark Other’s violent end in a form of ritual sacrifice, purging the very source of the darkness and righting the wrongs of the world before returning to haunt the happy ending.

(Kathryn – Independent Scholar of Disability Studies, Ria – Professor of Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University, “Science Fiction, Disability, Disability Studies A Conversation,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 14.4, 2020, pp. 387-401)

In 2014, the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA)—the leading international organization for science fiction research—circulated the call for papers for its 2015 conference, entitled “The SF We Don’t (Usually) See: Suppressed Histories, Liminal Voices, Emerging Media.” The authors of the call rightly highlighted “racial, gendered, classed, and sexual hierarchies” as constituent factors in the development of the science fiction (SF) canon, inviting potential participants to explore the new possibilities offered when we “seek out those liminal voices that have been denied access to privileged outlets.” Suggested paper topics included feminist, queer, and non-Western SF; and women, “LGBTQIA individuals,” and “people of colour” were namechecked as examples of groups who have been, or might still be, marginalized as creators of SF, or in terms of representation within the genre. Nowhere in the call for papers was there any reference to disability. As scholars who had been working at the intersection of disability studies and science fiction studies for some years by 2014—and as scholars who had presented multiple disability-focused papers at SFRA and other major SF-focused conferences—our response to this omission was both frustration and a weary sense of déjà vu. We waited a few days, in the hope that someone in SFRA’s wide distribution list, or within the organization’s hierarchy, would notice the omission of disability and realize it was problematic; when there was no update evident, we raised the issue ourselves. The organization’s leadership acknowledged our concerns, and a later version of the conference call included “SF and ability/disability” on the list of suggested paper topics.1 Although it is easy to say that such exclusion might be an unintentional misstep (and this is certainly the response we consistently receive when we call out omissions), it is merely one in a long history of SF scholarship not seeing disability. There are many oversights and microaggressions we have witnessed or encountered in our workplaces, at conferences, and in the field’s scholarship, but writing about them in any specific detail feels unsafe and “unprofessional.” We recognize that this is ableism at work. In Kathryn’s experience, for example, any participation at conferences comes with her anxious requests for “special” accommodation on presentation times, which are not always respected. Although we certainly appreciate the difficulty of scheduling large, multi-track conferences, when organizers of genre conferences do not know how to effectively include disability studies and disabled presenters, it makes talking about disability in a sustained, critical way (that meaningfully intersects with feminist, queer, labour, and anti-racist conversations) that much more difficult. For readers of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS), these moments are likely to be scenes in a familiar story: disability, even when it is or should be at its most visible, is either ignored or quickly passed over in favour of other talking points that may be more comfortable for the critic. Over the last three decades, cultural disability studies has transformed from an emergent area of enquiry into a vibrant and thriving interdisciplinary field. Nonetheless, it remains a field engaged in an ongoing struggle for recognition and legitimation. In this context, what David Bolt terms critical avoidance is entirely to be expected: the avoidance of disability, and disability studies, by scholars who are engaging with texts and topics where disability is of manifest significance.2 We do not mean to suggest that the (undoubtedly well-intentioned) authors of conference calls or conference track organizers intentionally marginalize disability or disabled people. Nor do we suggest that that authors of CFPs and articles in SF and genre scholarship should always attempt to exhaustively list and interrogate the many types of persons or texts marginalized in SF creation and representation. Yet there are multiple ironies in the omission of disability in these contexts. In the theme chosen for the SFRA conference, the phrase “The SF We Don’t (Usually) See” is an allusion to the classic SF short story “The Women Men Don’t See” (1973) by James Tiptree Jr., the pen name of Alice Sheldon, a disabled woman. The irony of failing to acknowledge disabled people as one of SF’s marginalized groups while alluding to a story by a disabled writer is only one of a set of ironies in the omission of disability in the CFP, exemplifying a wider tendency to fail to “see” disability where it is undeniably present—in the story itself and in the genre’s wider history.3 While it might be tempting to accuse of us of nit-picking this one example, it is important to keep in mind that the work of recognizing the absence of disability is essential in the process of actually making the varied spaces of scholarship and conferences accessible. As Tanya Titchkosky reminds us, “making absence not-noticeable requires work, ordinary work, and sometimes a lot of it” (87). By pointing out such ordinary instances of exclusion and omission, we seek to encourage our fellow genre scholars to do better in their engagement with disability. Whether in CFPs, conference schedules, or journal articles, which words are used and which words are left out matter as: “[t]he many-sidedness of recognition resides in the complexity of and between every word. Words provide access to worlds. Words are the mediation of the relations between us and are able to remake these worlds” (Titchkosky 148).

(Chris, “Five Signs Your Story Is Ableist,” 7 April 2017, https://mythcreants.com/blog/five-signs-your-story-is-ableist/)

If you write ableist stories, you are contributing to the systemic oppression of people with disabilities or diseases. Of course, you probably don’t mean to make their lives worse, but good intentions won’t erase the damage your story does. and make positive changes. You can start purging ableism from your work by looking for these . 1. Characters’ Bodies Are Used for Jokes In the 2017 show , a henchman is introduced who has hooks for hands. He’s an amusing character who lightens otherwise threatening scenes with humor. Unfortunately, part of the henchmen’s comedic routine is his disability. Viewers are intended to laugh at his awkward attempts to grab doorknobs, make phone calls, and handle a deck of cards. Similarly, popular stories still think it’s acceptable to mock people for being heavy. In the Netflix series , the main character is a slim high schooler. His best friend Toby is heavy, and the writers constantly use Toby for fat shaming intended as humor. For instance, after the hero and Toby hop on their bikes to ride away from danger, they naturally find an alley so narrow that Toby gets stuck trying to escape. Must I explain that mocking people because of their bodies is demeaning and disrespectful? This kind of mockery not only has a direct psychological effect on the people with those conditions but also encourages real-life harassment. Even without direct shaming, using characters with similar bodies for comic relief over and over again spreads the message that they exist to entertain able-bodied people. We’ve created a cultural climate where people with short stature or obesity feel pressured to be funny. Never forget that physical activity isn’t possible for some disabled people, and high body fat can be caused by numerous diseases. Fat shaming supports ableism. And even if that weren’t true, fat shaming still wouldn’t be okay. How to Fix It Look for any place where you’re using slapstick humor and make sure that slapstick isn’t generated through a character’s disabilities or impairments. Then, make some of your protagonists heavy, and don’t make them funny. Give them and . That doesn’t mean characters with disabilities can’t make jokes or others can’t make jokes about them, but those jokes shouldn’t be both at their expense and because of their disability. 2. Disability Is a Great Tragedy In the 2009 movie , Jake Sully is driven by his desire to cure his disability. He’s a paraplegic and dreams of having freedom of movement. Because Mr. Evil Military Man promises that he’ll “get his legs back,” Jake is persuaded to be a double agent against the people he cares about. Everything turns out okay though, because Team Good can also remove his disability. Jake’s new avatar form is big, strong, and able-bodied, and it’s continually contrasted with his small and weak paraplegic body. And Jake isn’t the only hero driven to get rid of a disability. In the 2016 , the titular doctor is injured, resulting in shaky hands. He goes to the far side of the Earth in order to learn magic in hopes of putting his hands back the way they were. Heroes like Jake and Strange never actually adjust to their disability or accept it. For them, it is a sign of their inadequacy. The few disabled characters with unquestionably permanent impairments are usually designed to be objects of pity. Tiny Tim from is a classic example. He doesn’t have his own personality. He exists to be an innocent and tragic figure, more like a lost kitten than a human being. Just imagine for a second that you were a bit short, or slightly tall, or had some other uncommon physical trait – which you almost certainly have. You go to the movies, and the threat of becoming like you is motivating the heroes to take terrible risks. The one character who is already like you is constantly bemoaning their state, relying on the charity of others, and being pitied by everyone. Some protagonists – such as the main character of the 2016 – even choose to die rather than live as you live. That is the reality for many disabled people. They’re just people living normal lives, and they’re doing fine. They aren’t brave fighters, or sources of inspiration about the human spirit, or to be pitied. Turning their lives into a tragedy is an attack on their value as people. Don’t do it. How to Fix It There is a place for stories about people’s struggles with disabilities, but they are best left to those with direct experience. Otherwise, disabled characters should have similar struggles to able-bodied characters; . Instead of using the threat or continuance of a disability as a stake in your story, look for another way to motivate your protagonist. Maybe they lose their career not because they gain a disability but because their reputation is ruined. Maybe instead of a cure, they want the money to buy their way out of an unhealthy situation. Whatever you were using to make their disability meaningful can still be used, just without the disability. 3. Disabilities Miraculously Disappear When John Locke wakes up in the first episode of the TV series , he finds that, somehow, he doesn’t need his wheelchair anymore. In the Netflix Original , the series starts with a woman returning after a long disappearance. She was blind before, but now she can see. Time and time again, speculative fiction writers just can’t help converting disabled characters into able-bodied people. For your next trick, are you going to convert important characters of color into white people? In numerous shows from to , characters are given disabilities for an episode just to cure them before the finish. We see them grieving over how horrible it is to be disabled, but we rarely see them accept their disability and adapt to their new lifestyle. Of course, despite almost every disease being magically cured in Lost, the character with a heroin addiction is still an addict. If we admitted that addiction was a disease and not a personal failing, we wouldn’t be able to just throw addicts in jail anymore. Like other under-privileged groups, people who have disabilities get very little representation in our stories. So you might imagine how infuriating it is to watch the few disabled characters magically transform into able-bodied people. And in most cases, these characters have problems accepting their disability that are never addressed. What should be their character arc is completely abandoned in favor of just “fixing” them. How to Fix It Give some of your characters permanent disabilities. Start the story with them to their disability. It can give them occasional trouble, but it shouldn’t be the focus of their character. If one of your characters acquires a disability during the story, they should keep it. Show them adapting to their new lifestyle, and then move on. Don’t make getting rid of their disability a plot point of any kind. 4. Mental Illness Is Threatening The TV series stars an impressive lineup of villains that rotate between being out on the streets and inside the infamous Arkham Asylum. This happens even though none of the villains appear to have an actual mental illness. In the city of Gotham, villainy and mental illness are considered interchangeable. And the DC universe is far from alone in using mental illness to explain away villainy or its villains have. From American Psycho to The Ring to M. Night Shyamalan’s new atrocity Split, popular stories are teaching everyone that the mentally ill are violent and dangerous. Movie after movie, such as Twelve Monkeys, Gothika, and Shutter Island, feature protagonists who are packaged as neurotypical and then get stuck inside asylums. Once they’re inside, their fellow patients are just another part of the fear factor. Storytellers create a host of mentally ill characters just to put them on display in a fictional freak show. Then, despite showing how these asylums are full of rampant abuse, heroes who escape never wonder if they should free all of the genuinely ill patients who definitely aren’t getting better in there. The truth is that mentally ill people are much more likely to be physically abused by others – including the police – than they are to harm anyone else. Stereotypes associating mental illness with violence increase the chances that those with mental illnesses will become targets. Oh, and those asylums? Abuse still happens there. Unless you know what it’s like to live under the threat of being dragged away, locked up, and given shock therapy, think again before including scary asylums in your story. How to Fix It that link villainy with disability. Your villains can be weird or eccentric, but never frame them as “insane.” Watch out for body language or behaviors that would make them resemble people with a real condition. Then, provide some positive representation for mentally ill people. Give a protagonist a mental illnesses, but don’t use it to drive the plot. Just let it hinder them a little on the odd occasion. Mentally ill characters should have a specific medical condition that you have researched and are depicting accurately. 5. Characters Fake Having a Disability In , Professor Quirrell is a shy, polite man who has a stutter. Only at the end of the book do readers learn that Quirrell’s disability was just an act he put on to make himself look innocent. And Professor Quirrell is far from alone. The famous surprise villain of pretends to have a limp. In , Lionel Luther pretends to be blind. In , Spike pretends to need a wheelchair after he’s recovered. Then, twist! The disabled person doesn’t actually have a disability; they are an able-bodied antagonist. Sometimes heroes even get in on the fakery, as with in the Netflix TV series and Mei in the 2004 . Yeah, I get it, characters pretending to be disabled provides the story with . But first, keep in mind that this trick only works because of harmful stereotypes about disabled people. Audiences dismiss disabled characters as innocent and incapable of mischief, both of which are demeaning. This trope reinforces that pity stereotype by making the character able-bodied the moment they are revealed to be capable and possibly threatening. And when villains do have genuine disabilities, it’s usually done for some gruesome shock factor that is equally damaging. Able-bodied people continually dismiss real disabilities. They assume the disabled people they meet are just lazy or aren’t exerting enough willpower. It’s bad enough for people with clearly visible disabilities, much less the large number of people with disabilities that are invisible. You can’t tell by looking at a person whether they will need a wheelchair. Continually parading around characters that lie about having a disability makes audiences suspicious of real people with real medical conditions. How to Fix It Don’t let any of your characters lie about having a disability. They can lie about everything else, but the disability should be genuine. This goes beyond the technicalities – you could argue that Daredevil is actually blind, but he is clearly pretending to be more impaired than he is. It’s also important to remember that a character who lies about a disability is completely different from a character who sometimes needs assistance and sometimes doesn’t. In the Star Wars prequels, Yoda puts aside his cane, , and picks it back up again. It’s easy to conclude that he was using the force to assist his body and that he can’t do that all the time. Many real people can walk for short distances but not long ones or have symptoms that vary in intensity. By including characters who have intermittent symptoms and never sowing doubt about their truthfulness, you’ll help build a positive outlook in real life. Most of our popular stories have been created by able-bodied people with little regard to the messages they send about everyone else. Unfortunately, their bad habits are easily picked up by the rest of us. Defeating those harmful messages in your own work requires research, thought, and the willingness to re-examine the tropes you once admired.

The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Asteroid mining. Gene editing. Synthetic meat. We could provide for the needs of everyone, in style. It just takes some imagination. It starts with a burger. In 2008 a Dutch professor named Mark Post presented the proof of concept for what he called “cultured meat.” Five years later, in a London TV studio, Mr. Post and his colleagues ate a burger they had grown from animal cells in a laboratory. Secretly funded by Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, the journey from petri dish to plate had cost $325,000 — making theirs the most expensive meal in history. Fortunately, the results were promising: Hanni Rützler, a nutrition scientist, concluded that the patty was “close to meat but not as juicy.” The next question was whether this breakthrough could be made cheaper. Much cheaper. The first “cultured beef” burgers are likely to enter the market next year, at approximately $50 each. But that won’t last long. Within a decade they will probably be more affordable than even the cheapest barbecue staples of today — all for a product that uses fewer resources, produces negligible greenhouse gases and, remarkably, requires no animals to die. It’s not just barbecues and burgers. Last year Just, a leader in cellular agriculture, cut a deal to start producing one of the world’s tastiest steaks, Wagyu. A company called Endless West, which also makes grapeless wine, has started to produce Glyph, the world’s first “molecular whiskey.” Luxury could be coming to all. The case of cultured food and drink, far from a curiosity, is a template for a better, freer and more affluent world, a world where we provide for the needs of everyone — in style. But how do we get there? To say the present era is one of crisis borders on cliché. It differs from the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, or hell in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. It is unlike Europe during the Black Death or Central Asia as it faced the Mongols. And yet it is true: Ours is an age of crisis. We inhabit a world of low growth, low productivity and low wages, of climate breakdown and the collapse of democratic politics. A world where billions, mostly in the global south, live in poverty. A world defined by inequality. But the most pressing crisis of all, arguably, is an absence of collective imagination. It is as if humanity has been afflicted by a psychological complex, in which we believe the present world is stronger than our capacity to remake it — as if it were not our ancestors who created what stands before us now. As if the very essence of humanity, if there is such a thing, is not to constantly build new worlds. If we can move beyond such a failure, we will be able to see something wonderful. The plummeting cost of information and advances in technology are providing the ground for a collective future of freedom and luxury for all. Automation, robotics and machine learning will, as many august bodies, from the Bank of England to the White House, have predicted, substantially shrink the work force, creating widespread technological unemployment. But that’s only a problem if you think work — as a cashier, driver or construction worker — is something to be cherished. For many, work is drudgery. And automation could set us free from it. Gene editing and sequencing could revolutionize medical practice, moving it from reactive to predictive. Hereditary diseases could be eliminated, including Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia, and cancer cured before it reaches Stage 1. Those technologies could allow us to keep pace with the health challenges presented by societal aging — by 2020 there will be more people over the age of 60 than under the age of 5 — and even to surpass them. What’s more, renewable energy, which has been experiencing steep annual falls in cost for half a century, could meet global energy needs and make possible the vital shift away from fossil fuels. More speculatively, asteroid mining — whose technical barriers are presently being surmounted — could provide us with not only more energy than we can ever imagine but also more iron, gold, platinum and nickel. Resource scarcity would be a thing of the past. The consequences are far-reaching and potentially transformative. For the crises that confront our world today — technological unemployment, global poverty, societal aging, climate change, resource scarcity — we can already glimpse the remedy. But there’s a catch. It’s called capitalism. It has created the newly emerging abundance, but it is unable to share round the fruits of technological development. A system where things are produced only for profit, capitalism seeks to ration resources to ensure returns. Just like today’s, companies of the future will form monopolies and seek rents. The result will be imposed scarcity — where there’s not enough food, health care or energy to go around. So we have to go beyond capitalism. Many will find this suggestion unwholesome. To them, the claim that capitalism will or should end is like saying a triangle doesn’t have three sides or that the law of gravity no longer applies while an apple falls from a tree. But for a better world, where everyone has the means to a good life on a habitable planet, it is an imperative. We can see the contours of something new, a society as distinct from our own as that of the 20th century from feudalism, or urban civilization from the life of the hunter-gatherer. It builds on technologies whose development has been accelerating for decades and that only now are set to undermine the key features of what we had previously taken for granted as the natural order of things. To grasp it, however, will require a new politics. One where technological change serves people, not profit. Where the pursuit of tangible policies — rapid decarbonization, full automation and socialized care — are preferred to present fantasies. This politics, which is utopian in horizon and everyday in application, has a name: Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Sounds good, doesn’t it?