Sens. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Finance, sent letters to IRS officials March 15 questioning an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) pilot program allowing outside experts to draft guidance documents for the IRS. The letters follow the controversy raised by a March 9 New York Times story [subscription] detailing the project, which allows tax lawyers and accountants to draft the documents rather than IRS officials. The IRS program, described in Notice 2007-17, calls for publication of a "notice for each guidance project selected for the program. The notice would identify research, background documents, drafts of proposed guidance and other work products, and ask interested parties to provide them." The IRS expects the projects will relate to "guidance in a narrow, technical area of the tax law, where the need for guidance is driven by market changes with which taxpayers may be more familiar than are the IRS and Treasury." The letters from Baucus and Grassley to the Treasury Department and IRS officials express concern about whether these departments are putting "special interests before the public interest" and whether "the process would result in some practitioners and taxpayers having undue influence over government regulations that would lead to beneficial outcomes for their clients or their own tax matters." The letters ask Treasury and the IRS to assess this guidance process and provide specific information about the program to the Finance committee. The New York Times story quotes Donald L. Korb, Chief Counsel at the IRS and one of the recipients of the letter, as supportive of the program and justifying it based on fairness to taxpayers and on the fact that these are technical issues of low priority. He is quoted as saying the pilot program does not change the current process. There is truth to Korb's statement. For six years, the Bush administration has provided access to special interests in unprecedented ways, as OMB Watch has documented often. (See, for example two reports, here, and here.) Establishing a pilot program to allow regulated parties to write tax regulations is an extension of existing practice elsewhere in federal agencies. Corporate interests have had a seat at the Bush administration's table to help write or frame policy and regulations, ranging from energy policy to consumer and work place safety to securities regulations to voluntary food safety guidelines. For example, a Seattle Times story from March 2004 describes how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency used industry language verbatim in writing a proposed mercury rule under Bush's Clear Skies initiative, which would have capped mercury emissions without requiring any additional costs to industry. Compliant Congresses before the 110th chose to ignore these trends or helped advance them. This may be changing as these issues garner media attention. For example, in the committee's press release about the Senators' letters, Grassley is quoted as saying: We don't need K Street lawyers writing enforcement regulations to help their clients create tax shelters. That would be worse than a camel's nose under the tent. It would be the whole caravan. We might as well have the Justice Department let defense counsels write sentencing guidelines. If the IRS is that short on resources, the commissioner needs to tell Congress. Bush's 2008 budget request for the IRS doesn't do a lot to help with the problem. The regulatory budget request is $157.4 million, down from $209.6 million enacted in 2006, when the IRS experienced across-the-board cuts. As happened in the Reagan administration, Bush is attempting to limit the size of government and abdicate its responsibilities by defunding federal agencies. OMB Watch Executive Director Gary Bass sarcastically summed up the trend in the New York Times article: "Why don't we just privatize Congress and outsource the development of our laws?"