From the 2019 Letter to the 2022 Release: The Fight for Trump's Tax Returns

The letter was short. On April 3, 2019, Richard Neal, a Democrat from western Massachusetts who had just become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, wrote to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue asking for six years of Donald Trump's individual tax returns and the returns of several of his business entities. Neal did not rely on a subpoena or a novel legal theory. He cited a single sentence in the tax code, section 6103(f), which says that on written request from the chairman of the House or Senate tax-writing committees, the Secretary of the Treasury "shall furnish" the committee with any return. The word is "shall." The law contains no exception for presidents. The returns arrived in the committee's hands more than three and a half years later, after two Treasury secretaries, a change of administration, a federal lawsuit, an appeal, a trip to the Supreme Court and, at the end, a race against the calendar before the majority that had asked for them was gone.

In short: A 1924 law gives Congress's tax committees the right to see any tax return. Ways and Means asked for Trump's in April 2019, the Treasury refused, and the committee did not get them until late 2022, days before Republicans took over the House. The fight shows how much of Congress's power depends on time, and why a new majority has to start its oversight early.

A law written in a scandal era

The statute Neal invoked was old even by Washington standards. Congress wrote the provision into the Revenue Act of 1924, in an era when it was investigating the Teapot Dome scandal, in which a cabinet secretary had leased federal oil reserves to private companies in exchange for bribes. Congress at the time was eager to assert its right to see information the executive branch held, and tax records were part of that push. The idea behind the provision was simple: the committees that write the tax laws need to be able to see how those laws actually work, including on particular taxpayers, and they should not need the permission of the agency they oversee.

For most of the century that followed, the power was used quietly. Requests under section 6103(f) were made, returns were delivered under confidentiality rules, and nobody made much of it. The statute's most famous earlier use came in the 1970s, when the Joint Committee on Taxation reviewed Richard Nixon's returns and found he owed back taxes, which he then paid. That precedent mattered in 2019, because it showed the committees had looked at a sitting president's taxes before.

The ask, the refusal and the stated reason

For decades before 2016, presidents and major-party nominees had voluntarily released at least some of their tax information. Trump, as a candidate in 2016 and then as president, did not, saying his returns were under audit. The IRS has long said that an audit does not prevent anyone from releasing his own return, but the point became a central talking point on both sides.

Neal's request was careful in a way that was meant to survive a court fight. He did not say the committee wanted to see whether the president had broken the law, or to publish the returns for political effect. He said the committee was examining the IRS's own program of mandatory audits of presidents and vice presidents, which had been the agency's policy since the 1970s, and needed to see whether that program was working. The purpose was oversight of the agency, which falls squarely within the committee's jurisdiction.

The Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, refused. In May 2019 he told the committee that the request lacked a legitimate legislative purpose and that the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel had concluded the same. The administration's position was that a statute cannot authorize a committee to demand information Congress has no legitimate reason to want, and that the committee's stated purpose was a pretext for exposing the president's private finances.

That argument was not absurd on its face. Courts had long held that Congress's investigative power is tied to its legislative function, and that Congress cannot investigate merely to expose. Defenders of the refusal also argued that allowing any committee chairman to obtain any citizen's tax return, including a political rival's, invited abuse. That concern is worth taking seriously, because the power cuts both ways. A Republican chairman could use the same sentence of the tax code to request the return of a Democratic official, and the statute would say "shall" just as firmly.

Two years in court, then a new administration

Ways and Means sued in July 2019. The case moved slowly, as lawsuits between the branches of government usually do. The courts first had to deal with whether the committee could sue at all and what standard applied to its stated purpose. Meanwhile, two other Trump tax fights reached the Supreme Court. In July 2020, in Trump v. Vance, the Court held that a sitting president is not immune from a state grand jury subpoena for his financial records. In Trump v. Mazars, decided the same day, it set out a new test for congressional subpoenas of a president's personal papers and sent that case back for more work. Neither case decided the Ways and Means request, which rested on a different law.

Then the election intervened. Joe Biden took office in January 2021, and the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel revisited the question. In July 2021 it issued a new opinion concluding that the committee had given sufficient reasons for its request and that the Treasury must comply. The executive branch had switched sides.

Trump himself continued to fight, now as a private citizen intervening to block the release. In December 2021 a federal district judge, Trevor McFadden, ruled for the committee, finding that the request had a valid legislative purpose and that courts should not second-guess Congress's stated reasons. The D.C. Circuit affirmed in August 2022. Trump asked the Supreme Court to step in, and in November 2022 the Court denied his application without noted dissent. The Treasury turned the returns over to the committee shortly afterward.

The calendar was the real opponent

The timing is the part of this story that matters most for anyone thinking about the next majority. By the time the Supreme Court declined to intervene, Democrats had already lost the House in the November 2022 midterm elections. The Republican majority would take over on January 3, 2023, and it was not going to pursue the request. Neal's committee had a few weeks.

It used them. On December 20, 2022, Ways and Means voted along party lines to make public a report on the returns, prepared with the help of the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. The returns themselves, with sensitive personal details redacted, were released on December 30. The report's headline finding was about the agency, not the president. The IRS's mandatory audit program, the committee said, had not been carried out as policy required during Trump's first years in office. The first mandatory audit of his presidential-era returns was opened in April 2019, the same month Neal's letter arrived. The committee recommended that Congress write the audit program into law rather than leave it to agency policy.

The public release itself drew criticism, and not only from Republicans. Some tax experts warned that using the committee's power to publish a private citizen's returns, even a former president's, set a precedent a future majority could turn against anyone. Defenders answered that the statute allows the committee to submit returns to the full House, that Congress has a legitimate interest in showing its work, and that a president's finances are a matter of public concern in a way an ordinary taxpayer's are not. Here's my view, stated as one. The release was defensible on these facts, but the worry about precedent is real, and a party that values norms should want clear written limits on when a committee may publish what it receives.

There had been an earlier revelation that the release mostly confirmed. In September 2020 The New York Times had obtained years of Trump's tax information and reported, among other things, that he had paid $750 in federal income tax in each of 2016 and 2017. The 2022 release added official documents to a story the public had already partly seen.

What the delay teaches

Look at the timeline as a whole. A request made under a statute that says "shall" took from April 2019 to December 2022 to fulfil. The president at the center of it served out his term and left office before the committee saw a single return. The committee that asked received the returns in the final weeks of its own majority. If the 2022 election had been held a few months earlier, or the courts had moved a few months slower, the request would simply have expired.

This is the structural weakness of congressional oversight. Congress has strong legal tools and almost no tools to make the executive branch use them quickly. An administration that wants to run out the clock can refuse, wait for a lawsuit, appeal every ruling and count on the next election. Courts are generally reluctant to rush disputes between the political branches, and a two-year House term is short. A majority that starts its oversight in the second year of its term is already late.

Conservatives sometimes point out, fairly, that the same dynamic has frustrated Republican investigations of Democratic administrations. That is the point. The weakness belongs to the institution, not to one party, and both parties have reasons to fix it.

There is also a quieter cost that rarely makes the news. Every month a request sits in litigation, the committee's staff spend time on briefs instead of on the policy work the request was meant to inform. Witnesses leave government. Records age. Public attention moves on. By the time the Ways and Means report appeared, the central question it answered, whether the IRS had audited a sitting president on schedule, concerned years that were already long past, and the man whose returns were at issue was a former president planning another campaign. Oversight that arrives that late can still produce a useful reform. It rarely produces accountability for the people who were in charge when the problem happened.

Fixing the process instead of fighting it every time

There are reforms on the table, some with support across party lines, that would make the next fight shorter.

One is to write the presidential audit program into law, as the 2022 report recommended, so that a president's returns are examined by the IRS on a set schedule whether or not anyone asks. Democrats introduced bills to do that; none has passed. A second is to require presidents and major-party nominees to release their returns, an idea that was part of the 2019 For the People Act and that several states have also tried to impose for ballot access. A third, more general, is to give congressional subpoena enforcement suits an expedited track in the courts, with deadlines, so that disputes are decided in months rather than years.

Each idea carries a fair objection. Writing the audit program into law raises the question of how far Congress should direct the IRS's enforcement decisions. Mandatory disclosure laws raise questions about which qualifications for federal office the Constitution allows states to add, and California's attempt to require disclosure for primary candidates was struck down by its own state supreme court in 2019. Expedited court review means asking judges to decide politically charged cases quickly, which some judges resist. Those are reasons to write the reforms carefully, not reasons to accept the four-year delay as normal.

The lesson for January 2027

Democrats won the House and the Senate on November 3, 2026, and the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027, with Donald Trump in his second term. Section 6103(f) still says what it said in 1924, and the precedent set by the 2019-2022 fight still stands: courts upheld the request, and the returns were handed over. Whether the new majority uses the statute again is a political choice, not a legal puzzle.

Whatever it decides about tax returns, the broader lesson applies to every investigation it opens. Start on day one. Make the requests narrow and tie each one to legislation the committee might write. Build a record that survives a court challenge. Expect the other side to wait for the calendar, and plan for a two-year window, not a four-year one. And write the reforms that would make the next fight shorter while your party holds the gavel, because the next majority may belong to someone else.

What you can do

• Follow the oversight fights as the new majority begins them. Our page on democracy and the rule of law tracks investigations, subpoena battles and inspector-general reports, so you can watch which requests are moving and which are stalling.
• Watch the court cases as they come down. The court watch page lists this term's Supreme Court opinions with the Court's own summaries, along with the emergency docket, where disputes between Congress and the executive often land first.
• Push for the process fixes. Ask your representative and senators whether they support writing the presidential audit program into law and speeding up court review of congressional subpoenas. The representative finder gives you their phone numbers and contact forms.
• See what both parties have already agreed on. Good-government reforms sometimes pass with support from both sides. The common ground page lists bills both parties passed together, a useful reference when you ask a member whether a reform is possible.

The statute that started all this has one strong verb, and it took nearly four years to make that verb mean what it says. A new majority does not have four years. It has two, and the clock starts in January.