Elon Musk's Handpicked IRS Chief Lasts Just 72 Hours
The acting commissioner of the IRS, who was installed by Elon Musk's DOGE and is best known for blowing the whistle on Hunter Biden, has been forced out of his role before he even had time to get started.
Gary Shapley will be replaced as the interim head of the service after just 72 hours on the job, sources told The New York Times on Friday. The deputy secretary of the Treasury, Michael Faulkender, is expected take over at the IRS in an interim role.
The leadership swap is the latest to roil the IRS, which has had a conveyor belt of temporary leaders in MAGA 2.0. The change comes just three days after taxes were due for the majority of Americans.
Shapley, 47, was pushed out by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the Times reported. Sources said Bessent 'complained' to President Donald Trump that Shapley was 'installed without his knowledge' and 'at the behest of billionaire Elon Musk.'
A peeved Bessent, 63, claimed Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency acolytes had 'done an end run around him' to convince the White House to hire Shapley—despite Bessent being the boss of whoever runs the tax collection service.
Shapley, a longtime IRS agent, appears to have gotten the boot simply because he was hired without Bessent's 'blessing.' The Times does not list any specific actions that led to him getting sacked, and he was spotted in the IRS commissioner's office as recently as Friday morning. A source told The Wall Street Journal he will remain at the IRS as a senior official in its criminal investigation division.
Shapley was the third acting IRS executive of Trump's presidency. In the role before him was Melanie Krause, who resigned this month in opposition to migrants' tax info being shared with ICE. She had replaced longtime IRS official Douglas O'Donnell, who CNN reports retired 'after weathering weeks of chaos and cutbacks at the agency.'
Shapley became a MAGA darling in 2022 and 2023 when he and an IRS colleague derided the Department of Justice and a Delaware district attorney for allegedly slow-walking its probe into the finances of President Joe Biden's son Hunter.
He testified to Congress that federal prosecutors in Delaware were shielding the then-president from scrutiny in the case and had gone as far as tipping off his family ahead of a storage unit search in Northern Virginia tied to their probe.
Among the alleged obstruction, Shapley claimed, was prosecutors refusing to grant access to files from Hunter's abandoned laptop, blocking them from speaking to some in the first family, and vetoing a request to search a Biden guest house.
Hunter Biden, 55, was eventually indicted on accusations he failed to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes. He pleaded guilty to all federal charges in the case in September, but was pardoned by his dad before his sentencing hearing.
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