‘Could you make these guys essential?’: Mortgage industry gets shutdown relief after appeal to senior Treasury officials

By Lisa Rein and Jeff Stein January 11 at 5:30 PM

After an intense lobbying campaign by the mortgage industry, the Treasury Department this week restarted a program that had been sidelined by the partial government shutdown, allowing hundreds of Internal Revenue Service clerks to collect paychecks as they process forms vital to the lending industry.

The hasty intervention to restore the IRS’s income verification service by drawing on revenue from fees — even as 800,000 federal employees across the country are going without their salaries — has intensified questions about the Trump administration’s un­or­tho­dox efforts to bring certain government functions back online to contain the shutdown’s impacts.

Critics, including many former IRS officials, described the move as an act of favoritism to ease the burden on a powerful industry.

“It seems crazy to me that a powerful bank or lobby gets to bring their people back to do their work,” said Marvin Friedlander, who served as a senior IRS official in the mid-2000s. “How about the normal slob who can’t even pay his rent?”

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