During his first term, Donald Trump had a knack for choosing officials to run agencies that officials thought it shouldn’t exist. Rick Perry, for example, has called for the elimination of Ministry of Energybut that didn’t stop Trump from nominating Perry to head the Department of Energy. Mick Mulvaney called for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before Trump chose him to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The list, unfortunately, don’t stop there.

As the president-elect prepares to return to the White House, a similar list is beginning to take shape. The Republican, for example, announced his intention to appoint a Republican Party operative named Kash Patel to lead the FBI, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that Patel swore to “close” the office headquarters and “reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state’.”

Likewise, Trump tapped former Republican Rep. Billy Long of Missouri to run the Internal Revenue Service, which might not be particularly noteworthy if the former congressman hadn’t repeatedly tried to abolish the Internal Revenue Service. Tim Noah of The New Republic described it as a timely example of “choosing a fox to guard the henhouse.”

Before delving further into this topic, it is important to pause and note that the Republican president-elect should not choose anyone to lead the IRS. The outgoing commissioner, Danny Werfel, was appointed in 2022 for a five-year term and, clearly, he wants to keep his position – traditionally a “relatively non-partisan management work“- until the end of his term.

Trump obviously intends to fire him, however — an unprecedented gesture and evidence of an elected president determined to consolidate power after running on an authoritarian-style platform.

John Koskinen, former IRS commissioner, expressed his concern this week, Trump and his team would turn their position “into a political position.” Clearly, this is precisely what the new Republican has in mind.

To complicate matters, The New York Times reported after Trump’s announcement that Long has a problematic history of peddling a pandemic tax credit that the IRS says “is a magnet for fraud.”

But as the former Missouri congressman prepares for Senate confirmation scrutiny, the most fundamental questions arise: Why Long should lead a critically important federal agency that, according to shouldn’t he exist?