WASHINGTON ― The Internal Revenue Service is starting to look like the partisan tool that Republicans accused it of being during the Barack Obama administration.

The Donald Trump administration has assumed more control than its predecessors over how the agency writes tax regulations, ordered unpaid IRS workers to process tax refunds during the government shutdown, intervened to block Democrats’ request for the president’s tax returns, and, as we learned this week, buried a staff memo outlining how the agency should respond to such requests.

Under federal law, when certain members of Congress ask for private tax information, the IRS has no choice but to hand it over, according to that legal analysis, which The Washington Post exposed Tuesday. That’s contrary to the administration’s position, which is that the disclosure would be unconstitutional.

An IRS spokesperson said that the memo is not the agency’s position, that it hadn’t been finalized, that Commissioner Charles Rettig hadn’t seen it before, and that the IRS never sent the document to its parent agency, the Treasury Department.

The memo was written by unnamed staffers sometime in the fall ― when the prospect of Democrats retaking the House of Representatives and using their power to seek Trump’s taxes was already a major news story. The president has long refused to make his returns public.

“I suspect that that memo was not drafted by a summer intern,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project, an anti-corruption initiative of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Democrats asked last month for six years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns, only to have Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin rebuff their request ― even though the request was addressed not to him but to Rettig, since it’s the commissioner who traditionally handles requests for private tax information. The tax code says that if the treasury secretary wants to step in and enforce tax laws himself, he’s supposed to give Congress 30 days notice that he plans to revoke responsibilities previously delegated to the commissioner.

Mnuchin did not give any notice before taking command of the tax return request, nor has he justified not giving notice. In response to queries from Democrats at committee hearings, both Mnuchin and Rettig have simply said that the Treasury supervises the IRS. Rettig has said little else.

“Charles Rettig has taped his mouth, or maybe Mnuchin taped his mouth,” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), a member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, told HuffPost this week. “He’s out of the picture. He’s irrelevant.”

Treasury’s bigfooting of the tax return request is typical of how the Trump administration has treated the IRS, said Mark Mazur, a former assistant secretary for tax policy at Treasury and current co-director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

“What you’re seeing here is much more of the smaller decisions being run through a process that includes people outside the IRS,” Mazur said.