Take out the "lavish gatherings," and you can save, what—$2 million? $10 million? Great reason to cut $1.35 billion! Here is the reality. Cutting the Internal Revenue Service will result in a serious drop in revenue—fewer audits, less oversight, with many studies showing that additional funding for the agency has always resulted in a sixfold or greater increase in federal revenues without changing the law to increase taxes. That will worsen our federal budget deficits. At the same time, fewer personnel will mean many fewer taxpayers reaching the IRS to get answers to questions, more delays in processing returns and refunds, a much rougher tax season, and lots of pain for individuals.

It would be easy to see this as a plot by radical antigovernment nihilists to create even more anger at government, with the IRS as a perennial punching bag reaching new heights as a target. Or maybe this is a conspiracy to benefit the richest among us, who already have the advantage of being able to hire the best and brightest lawyers and accountants to find ways to evade taxes—and now will encounter even less resistance to their schemes and many fewer problems with audits.

But let's be more generous, and say that the perpetrators are lashing out at an agency run by one of the best and most respected administrators to grace government in decades, John Koskinen, without fully appreciating the ramifications.

The Partnership for Public Service recently came out with its annual rankings of government employees' satisfaction by department, agency, and bureau. The ratings overall are down (more about that below). The IRS ranks 163rd among sub-components of agencies and departments (it is a unit in the Treasury Department). Why? Here are a few reasons: A stressed and undermanned staff of accountants and tax attorneys who have to do battle with private counterparts who make three, 10, or 100 times what they do, who know that tax collectors are never popular, now have to face deeper budget cuts, more strain, more politically driven attacks, more pay freezes, and no ability to keep up with advances in their field because any conferences or meetings will be ripped in "oversight" hearings by Roskam, Crenshaw, and Johnson, among others.

The partnership survey shows growing dissatisfaction across most federal agencies. That is coupled with another grim reality, highlighted earlier this week by Lisa Rein in The Washington Post, in a story headlined, "Millennials Exit the Federal Workforce as Government Jobs Lose Their Allure." The problem here is not just the budget cuts, budget uncertainty, sequester pain, and shutdown threats and reality; it is also a continuing, broken recruitment process that takes smart, talented young people motivated to try public service and throws obstacle after obstacle in their way. Some of this is built into the law, while much comes from failures in the executive branch to streamline and modernize recruitment and retention.