With the 2023 tax season officially starting Monday, House Republicans have shown no signs of backing off plans to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Agency, as members seek to dismantle the agency less than a year after Democrats increased its funding.

The move provides a glimpse into the sharply contrasting policy views of the two parties surrounding the agency. While Republican lawmakers introduced the bill on Jan. 9 to abolish the IRS, replacing the entire federal tax code with a national sales tax, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Reuters on Sunday that rebuilding the IRS would be one of her top priorities, praising the approval of $80 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act to help track down $600 billion in unpaid tax bills.

Republican attacks on the agency have stalled in the House, but criticism seems likely to continue should the extra funding not accelerate the agency's main tasks. The Republican focus on the IRS has not dissipated since taking control of the House after the midterm elections, with several members promising to reel in the agency.

The most significant grievance House Republicans have with the IRS involves the misleading claim that the increased funding provided by Democrats will lead to the hiring of 87,000 additional auditors.

"Instead of adding 87,000 new agents to weaponize the IRS against small business owners and middle America, this bill will eliminate the need for the department entirely by simplifying the tax code with provisions that work for the American people and encourage growth and innovation," said Georgia Republican Rep. Earl "Buddy" Carter, when he introduced the bill known as the Fair Tax Act earlier this month.

The bill seeks to remove the $45.6 billion directed toward suped-up tax enforcement and $25.3 billion for IRS operations support, which includes administration activities, IT development, and telecommunications.

The White House has come out against the Republican-backed bill, blasting it upon its introduction to the floor.

"With their first economic legislation of the new Congress, House Republicans are making clear that their top economic priority is to allow the rich and multi-billion dollar corporations to skip out on their taxes, while making life harder for ordinary, middle-class families that pay the taxes they owe," the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement, promising a veto by President Joe Biden.

It's highly unlikely that either bill will become law, given that Democrats still control the Senate and the White House.

"It's not going to become law, but it makes a very strong political statement," Mark Everson, a former IRS commissioner and current vice chairman at Alliantgroup, told CNBC.

Everson also noted that the partisan IRS divide isn't good for the agency's "long-term stability."

Since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in August 2022, the IRS has hired 5,000 new customer service agents. The agency has also worked to improve its technology so that taxpayers can ask questions via an automated service online, gambling on these investments to help clear the almost 400,000 unprocessed paper individual returns and about 1 million unprocessed business returns.

At the end of 2022, the IRS still had a backlog of 9 million tax returns that needed to be processed. According to a New York Times report, only 13% of 173 million calls in 2022 reached a representative, and the average hold time was 29 minutes.

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