In the first days of April 2020, Internal Revenue Service workers were on the verge of a victory lap. Despite tight deadlines imposed by Congress and pandemic-caused supply chain disruptions making it hard to secure paper, they were on track to disburse billions of dollars of economic stimulus payments and more than 100 million notices to recipients.
Then, Donald Trump swooped in. He had a demand unprecedented in recent times: to include his signature prominently with the support payments.
It blindsided IRS workers, forcing them to miss key deadlines and delaying the mailing of payment notices for several days, according to documents obtained by HuffPost through the Freedom of Information Act. Staff feared Trump’s overt politicization of the COVID support payments would tarnish the agency’s reputation, with some worrying that their actions violated federal law.
The effort, orchestrated by the White House and former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, gained wide attention at the time, with critics accusing Trump of violating the Hatch Act by mobilizing federal resources to benefit his reelection campaign against current President Joe Biden. The Justice Department did not pursue any action against Trump for his self-branding of the stimulus package, which was passed by Congress with bipartisan support.
Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images
But the documents, first reported by Bloomberg News, highlight the degree to which Trump’s self-aggrandizement disrupted the agency’s efforts to get the stimulus payments and notices sent under tight deadlines and pandemic-era resource shortages.
Former President Barack Obama has recently harped on Trump’s efforts to take credit for the stimulus checks.
“I often hear folks say, ‘Donald Trump sent me a check during the pandemic,’” Obama tweeted Monday. “I want to make sure you understand this: Congress sent you a check. By the way, Joe Biden also sent you a check during the pandemic, just like I gave people relief during the Great Recession. The difference is that we didn’t put our names on it – because it wasn’t about feeding our egos or advancing our politics, it was about helping people.”
The IRS had already drafted its notice to recipients of economic impact payments and was finalizing its negotiations with vendors to mail the notices on April 10, 2020, when staff began to receive word that Trump wanted his name to appear prominently somewhere on the check, the notice, or both.
Staff heard about it unexpectedly from a Treasury functionary without direct confirmation from then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, leaving them confused about whether the instructions they received were correct. The Treasury Department is the parent agency of the IRS.
“Did Counsel push back on this?” Jeffrey Tribiano, the IRS Deputy Commissioner for Operations, wrote in an email. “Did anyone raise the concern about how this makes the IRS appear?”
Mnuchin and Trump’s last-minute change paralyzed the process for days, as the agency received contradictory and constantly changing guidance from the Treasury Department and the White House.
At first, it appeared they wanted Trump’s signature on the check. But the president cannot legally disburse funds, so that idea was abandoned in favor of putting his name on the memo line of the check.
For several days IT workers were left in the dark about whether or how to include Trump’s name.
The White House then made clear it wanted Americans to also receive a letter signed by Trump.
The IRS then substituted a routine letter informing recipients that they had received a payment with a far more dramatic one penned by the White House that praised its own efforts to “wage total war on this invisible enemy.”
The White House version did not include key information about what recipients should do if they do not receive their payments within seven days ― even though the prior IRS draft did. The letter bore Trump’s printed name below a large image of his illegible signature, a series of broad squiggles resembling an EKG reading.
Implementing the changes posed repeated technical problems. The IRS, now clearly doing the bidding of the White House, did not know whether to include its agency logo on the letter, or whether to use its own return address.
Hours away from the deadline to send the letter to printing vendors, the White House told the IRS it wanted Americans to receive Trump’s letter on official White House letterhead. The White House didn’t provide the graphics, however, leaving IRS workers to Google “White House stationary.” IRS staff ultimately just included a header reading “The White House” above the word “Washington.”
The letter was supposed to read in English on the front and Spanish on the back, but Trump’s oversized, fat-lettered signature did not line up on both sides, making portions of the letter unreadable. Workers struggled to match the font of the Spanish translation with the English original, and worried about the political implications of translating the words “White House” at the top of the letter into Spanish.
“People might be shocked! shocked! to see translating in la Casablanca [sic],” IRS Assistant Director of Media and Publications Rick Baker quipped in an email in which his colleagues contemplated the change. The final translation left “White House” in English.
The White House also insisted on mailing out “a letter that is as traditional as possible, so it looks like it is being sent from the president,” IRS Publishing Director Steve Manno wrote on April 10. At least one vendor, however, had already committed to mailing the notice as a “self-mailer” — a single, enclosed sheet with perforated edges.
IRS staff repeatedly raised concerns about the ethics and legality of branding the federal payments with Trump’s name. “Nice political statement,” one staffer wrote in an email. “Did we do this with Bush and Obama… A letter from the president.”
“The one thing I want to document and get for us on the IRS side is a position from the OGE [Office of Government Ethics] that the IRS is not violating the HATCH act and our team who working [sic] and process the notice are not liable in respect to Hatch and the law,” IRS Wage and Investment Commissioner Kenneth Corbin wrote in an April 11 email.
The Office of Legal Counsel concluded by April 14 that putting Trump’s name on the memo line of stimulus checks approved by Congress did not amount to using government resources to support his future reelection. IRS FOIA redacted all legal discussions from the documents, citing attorney-client privilege.
“It is interesting about OLC,” an IRS lawyer wrote in an email. “It least [sic] that will provide some authoritative cover.”
IRS staff, however, continued to worry about how Trump’s actions made the agency look.
As late as April 14, days after the agency had blown its deadline to send its notice to print vendors over Trump’s 11th-hour changes, Commissioner Rettig was urging the Treasury Public Affairs Office to “pro-actively” share the existence of the letter, citing a request for information from the House Ways and Means Committee.
The White House clearly raised costs by butting into the process, though it’s unclear by how much or who bore them. Missing the deadline forced the agency to renegotiate its pricing with vendors, but the IRS FOIA Office redacted all discussions related to pricing.
Halting the distribution of notices while the agency sorted out how to put Trump’s name on economic impact payment checks without violating the law forced vendors to rent and guard tractor trailers holding millions of letters at an estimated cost of $50,000 per day. The Government Printing Office said that this cost was ultimately not charged, however.
And the White House’s insistence on mailing out its notice as a traditional letter sealed in an envelope was 25% more expensive than a self-mailer.
