Treasury Secretary Suggests Musk Will Turn AI Loose at IRS: ‘We’ll See Where That Takes Us’

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News host Laura Ingraham he might unleash artificial intelligence on the IRS to make the agency more efficient.

Bessent said on Thursday’s edition of The Ingraham Angle that he would decide what to do with the agency after Elon Musk’s DOGE finished its assessment.

Department of Government Emergency staffers were reportedly seen entering the IRS headquarters in Washington on Thursday afternoon. Hours later, Ingraham asked Bessent about the visit and if he had any plans to lay off IRS staffers.

“I’ve only been in Washington for three weeks, and what I can tell you is people don’t like when you move their cheese, but it’s not their cheese,” Bessent said. “It’s the American taxpayer’s cheese.” He told Ingraham Musk’s DOGE could help him to decide to use AI to modernize the IRS:

INGRAHAM: What cheese has been found in the IRS that might be eaten by the rats? What’s going on at the IRS today with DOGE?

BESSENT: Well, look, I don’t know what we’re going to find at the IRS, but I can tell you, with the IRS, I have three goals: collections, privacy, and customer service. And I don’t think that there is anyone who thinks that either of those three categories is firing on all cylinders by any means.

INGRAHAM: Could the IRS be melded into another agency or shrunk significantly?

BESSENT: Well, I think what we can do is, we’re at the advent of this great A.I. revolution. And the IRS, from my understanding, has 12 different I.T. systems that operate on a system called COBOL, which is what I learned to program in college in the 80s. So we’re going to do we’re going to do a big I.T. upgrade, and then we’ll see where that takes us.

Watch above via Fox News.