No, Biden isn't hiring 87,000 IRS agents The House will be voting today on the big spending package approved in the Senate that features many key Biden administration priorities. The GOP has focused its fire on provisions that would bolster the Internal Revenue Service with new funding to crack down on tax cheats. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), for instance, declared in a tweet: "Do you make $75,000 or less? Democrats' new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you — with 710,000 new audits for Americans who earn less than $75k." These numbers are a misfire, lacking significant context. The Biden administration is planning to hire 87,000 IRS employees over the next 10 years — not IRS audit agents — and many will be replacing people who will retire soon. That's a big difference. As for hyperbolic claims about audits, McCarthy's tweet lacks important context. The numbers reflect a relatively small percentage increase for people making less than $75,000 — and a big one for the superwealthy. In any case, the calculations relied on a Congressional Budget Office analysis that the agency says was not intended to be used in this way, making the numbers even more dubious. McCarthy earned Three Pinocchios. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Trump's campaign-style video rife with false claims One day after FBI agents executed a search warrant at former president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club, he posted a campaign-style video that has the earmarks of a nascent effort to reclaim the presidency. We've tried to be judicious about fact-checking Trump since he left the White House, but this seemed like a good opportunity to scrutinize some of the claims he makes to audiences at his rallies. We conducted a line-by-line accounting of Trump's statements of material fact, avoiding opinions, in the order in which they appear in the ad. The narration appears to come from a variety of speeches, spliced together to appear like a coherent argument. We assessed 18 statements — and found 89 percent were false or misleading. Some examples: "We are a nation that has the highest energy cost in its history …" False. Trump is speaking about nominal prices, not real prices. Gasoline prices spiked after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but adjusted for inflation, monthly retail prices still did not top June 2008's inflation-adjusted price of $5.38 a gallon, according to the Energy Information Administration. U.S. residential retail electricity prices jumped sharply in 2021 but inflation-adjusted prices have been higher, according to the EIA. Natural gas prices, adjusted for inflation, also have been higher. "Where crime is rampant like never before." False. Violent crime rose during the pandemic, but one or two years of data is not enough to make a trend — and murder and violent crime rates are still well below levels reached in the early 1990s. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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