President Donald Trump has sought to weaponize multiple federal agencies, advancing an expansive view of executive authority. He and his advisors have argued that the president should exercise direct oversight over every component of the executive branch. In doing so, Trump has rejected standing norms that granted certain agencies—the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Federal Reserve—a certain degree of institutional independence designed to shield their work from political influence.
The IRS has become one of Trump’s key targets. Last year, Trump demanded that the agency revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, an institution he has been publicly battling since the start of his second term. In October 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration was working to install loyalists at the top of the IRS’s criminal investigation division, positioning the unit to pursue his opponents. Most recently, Republicans in Congress declined to challenge acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s decision to grant Trump and his family immunity from tax audits—an extraordinary expansion of presidential power that would have even made then-President Richard Nixon blush.
President Donald Trump has sought to weaponize multiple federal agencies, advancing an expansive view of executive authority. He and his advisors have argued that the president should exercise direct oversight over every component of the executive branch. In doing so, Trump has rejected standing norms that granted certain agencies—the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Federal Reserve—a certain degree of institutional independence designed to shield their work from political influence.
The IRS has become one of Trump’s key targets. Last year, Trump demanded that the agency revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, an institution he has been publicly battling since the start of his second term. In October 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration was working to install loyalists at the top of the IRS’s criminal investigation division, positioning the unit to pursue his opponents. Most recently, Republicans in Congress declined to challenge acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s decision to grant Trump and his family immunity from tax audits—an extraordinary expansion of presidential power that would have even made then-President Richard Nixon blush.
Whether the politicization of the IRS or other agencies will ultimately succeed and endure remains uncertain. So far, the Republican Congress has shown little willingness to challenge these moves, while the Supreme Court has frequently upheld Trump’s assertions of presidential power. Just as significant, the administration has undertaken an aggressive effort to purge the IRS and other agencies of officials who are not fully aligned with MAGA. Historically, these civil servants have been essential to restraining presidents who reject the idea that meaningful guardrails apply to them—or those who decide to do what they want, regardless.
This was certainly true of Nixon, who also attempted to assert sweeping control over the IRS. Nixon’s effort was an early example of how presidents have tested the limits of executive authority and challenged the independence of agencies meant to operate above political pressure. The episode also reveals how courageous individuals can stymie such an expansionist program.
Elected in 1968 after defeating Democrat Hubert Humphrey and independent George Wallace, Nixon entered the White House with a grandiose view of presidential power. He surrounded himself with senior advisors who shared that vision and urged him to confront the civil servants and legislators who might try to limit his authority.
Nixon and his advisors understood from the outset that maintaining control over the IRS would be essential to advancing his goals. As speechwriter Pat Buchanan wrote, “There is no office in government touching on more people than the IRS.” The challenge for Nixon was that the agency had developed a significant degree of independence since reforms designed to strengthen its insulation were put into place in the early 1950s. Those reforms reflected a broad consensus that an agency overseeing the vast income tax system, which Congress and the Department of the Treasury had dramatically increased during World War II, needed to make decisions free from pressure originating in the Oval Office. Fears of corruption drove the reforms, too.
During the Watergate investigation, Congress uncovered a 1970 memorandum from White House assistant Tom Charles Huston to chief of staff H.R. Haldeman that said: “Nearly 18 months ago, the President indicated a desire for I.R.S. to move against leftist organizations taking advantage of tax shelters. I have been pressing I.R.S. since that time to no avail.”
White House counsel John Dean became the point person for the operation. According to historian Joseph Thorndike, Dean sought a systematic restructuring of the IRS that would make the agency more “politically responsive” to the president. He had full backing of Haldeman. One of the men’s central objectives was to use the IRS’s audit powers against individuals on the president’s “enemies list,” including perceived opponents in government, the media, and other institutions that might obstruct his agenda or threaten his power. The administration had begun compiling this list in 1971, with the aim, according to Dean, being to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
Securing an IRS commissioner who was willing to cooperate with the White House’s agenda was essential to the plan.
On June 22, 1971, Nixon dismissed his first IRS commissioner, Randolph Thrower, an Atlanta attorney whose efforts to streamline the agency and work on a major tax reform bill in 1969 had not been sufficient to win the administration’s confidence. Even Thrower’s willingness to investigate the tax-exempt status of progressive nonprofit organizations through the newly created Special Services Staff was not enough to offset his refusal to hire certain Nixon loyalists. Nor would Thrower authorize politically motivated audits of the president’s opponents. His failure to be a yes-man cost him the job.
Nixon made clear that he wanted Thrower’s successor to be someone who would follow his directives. “I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he’s told,” he told Haldeman and advisor John Ehrlichman on May 13, “that every income-tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends. Now it’s as simple as that. If he isn’t, he doesn’t get the job.”
In the end, however, the White House allowed the process to slip out of its tight control. Attorney General John Mitchell pushed for the appointment of Johnnie Walters, the son of South Carolina sharecroppers and a World War II veteran who had joined the Department of Justice in 1969. Walters was no hidden liberal. He had earned conservative respect for defending the tax-exempt status on which many all-white Southern academies relied. The influential Sen. Strom Thurmond lobbied Nixon to elevate Walters to the post. The New York Times predicted that Walters appealed to Nixon because he would “not be overly independent in exercising his political office.” The Senate confirmed him.
Walters quickly began to understand what the White House expected of him. On Sept. 11, 1972, John Dean handled him the “enemies list,” roughly 200 names, and explained that the administration wanted each of them investigated. Walters was stunned by the request and refused to comply. He later recalled saying, “John, do you realize what you’re doing?”
Walters informed Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz who advised him to lock up the list and take no action. Walters also shared the document with Laurence Woodworth, the influential chief of staff of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, to create a paper trail demonstrating that he had not acted on the White House’s request. Frustrated by Walters’s defiance, Nixon told John Dean four days later, “You’ve got to kick Walters’s ass out first and get a man in there.” He also expressed frustration with Shultz. “What’s he trying to do, say that you can’t play politics with the IRS? There are ways to do it! Goddamn it, sneak in in the middle of the night!”
Although the evidence is not as clear on this point, some writers have argued that he tried to use the IRS to create pressure on his opponents in the 1972 election, including Sen. George McGovern and Gov. George Wallace. What Nixon’s White House tapes did reveal is that on Aug. 3, 1972, in a meeting with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Nixon asked: “Are we looking over the financial contributors of the Democratic National Committee? Are we running their income tax returns?” Haldeman’s answer was disappointing: “Not as far as I know.” When Nixon asked, “We have all this power and we’re not using it. Now, what the Christ is the matter?” Ehrlichman explained, “We’ve got a guy who’s a pluperfect bastard. He’s a loyalist—he’s a fanatic loyalist—in the IRS.”
To be sure, Walters did not have a spotless record. He did allow for the IRS audit of Lawrence O’Brien, the Democratic National Committee chair who would later become the target of the Watergate break-in. But when the investigation produced no evidence of wrong-doing, Walters declined to continue the harassment. Nor did Walters stop the White House from interfering to halt investigations into friends and allies, including Rev. Billy Graham and the billionaire Howard Hughes.
In April 1973, Walters resigned. He told Time magazine: “The very base of the democratic way of life and the republican form of government is built on the self-assessment tax system. Now if you louse that up, and it was loused up by those people, we don’t have a democracy.”
Nixon’s tensions with the IRS did not end after Walters left. Walters was followed by Donald Alexander, who also stood firm. The same year that Walters resigned, a scandal unfolded about Nixon not having paid his fair share of taxes, thanks to questionable charitable donations involving his own pre-presidency papers. The scandal, which is in part what led him to say in November 1973, “I am not a crook,” resulted in a precedent of presidents disclosing their tax information.
Walters was not the only official who stood up to Nixon. Several other key figures in government, such then-Attorney General Elliot Richardson, also refused comply with the president’s demands, demonstrating that pockets of institutional resistance still existed within the administration.
Right now, the balance of power, such as it still exists, is in a far more precarious position. Intense hyper-partisan polarization has sharply reduced the willingness of Republicans to challenge the president, with only a few exceptions (like their opposition to his proposed DOJ slush fund). Unlike with Nixon, the public doesn’t need to wait for congressional investigations to find out what happened. Much of what Trump does is in broad daylight because he is confident Republicans will stand by his side—and because he feels that if a president acts in the open, it blunts the potential for scandal.
During his second term, Trump has also gone much further than Nixon in filling key government posts with loyalists who show little interest in safeguarding the integrity of the institutions they oversee. When the president presses them to act, they are generally willing to do so. And when officials such as former Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell defy him, he responds with threats, intimidation, and investigation. Meanwhile, the president now benefits from a Supreme Court with a conservative 6-3 majority that has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to a robust conception of executive authority, including the landmark decision in 2024 that gave presidents sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution.
Restoring balance to the system and reining in the presidency will require many different efforts. Among the most important will be courageous individuals within the executive branch—figures like Walters in the early 1970s—who possess the temerity to say no when asked to take actions that erode principles first asserted 250 years ago.
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