IRS Budget (UPDATED)

As Forbes reports, the IRS has gotten hammered in the latest appropriations bill:

The Internal Revenue Service is one of the biggest losers in the 2014 budget deal agreed to last night by House and Senate negotiators. Under the agreement, the service would get just $11.3 billion, which is $526 million below its 2013 budget and $1.7 billion less than President Obama requested.

Read in conjunction with the Taxpayer Advocate report discussed here, this is, not surprisingly, a disaster. And there is no question that this is payback by Republicans.  After all, the appropriations bill contains the following provisions:

SEC. 107. None of the funds made available under this Act may be used by the Internal Revenue Service to target citizens of the United States for exercising any right guaranteed under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

SEC. 108. None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Internal Revenue Service to target groups for regulatory scrutiny based on their ideological beliefs.

And just for good measure, they added this one as well:

SEC. 105. None of funds made available to the Internal Revenue Service by this Act may be used to make a video unless the Service-Wide Video Editorial Board determines in advance that making the video is appropriate, taking into account the cost, topic, tone, and purpose of the video.

Note that the Service-Wide Video Editorial Board is an internal IRS organization created to review videos created for training and other purposes,, in response to the Inspector General's report on the 2010 training conference in Anaheim that raised so many hackles last year.  So basically, this provision mandates that the IRS do what it said it was already going to do.

There is, of course, no evidence that the IRS committed the acts described in Sec 107 and 108 either.  As the Forbes article deftly puts it:

If you like irony, you might keep in mind that the 501(c)(4) mess was caused in part by a lack of resources. The short-staffed agency was so overwhelmed by requests for tax-exempt status that poorly trained workers tried to shrink the backlog with what turned out to be clumsy shortcuts (word searches for “tea party,” “progressive,” and the like). Thanks to Congress and its budget, this will now get worse.

Yep.

UPDATE:  It's a done deal.  Gotta love this from US News: "Lawmakers hope passage of appropriations bill ushers in new era of cooperation in Congress." Yeah, right.