The Senate on Thursday confirmed Billy Long as the next IRS Commissioner, which could mark a shift for taxpayers amid sweeping agency cuts.

Picked by President Donald Trump, the former Missouri Congressman’s nomination received mixed support from Washington and the tax community. But Senate Republicans confirmed Long via a party-line vote.

During the confirmation process, Long faced Democratic scrutiny over Trump loyalties and ties to dubious tax credits, among other questions, which he addressed during a May Senate Finance Committee hearing and written testimony. 

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When asked about Trump’s power over the agency during the May Senate hearing, Long said: “The IRS will not, should not be politicized on my watch.”

In written testimony, Long said he would “follow the law” when asked for specifics about how he would respond to political favor requests from Trump.

“The confirmation process was pretty controversial,” said Carl Tobias, law professor at University of Richmond’s School of Law.

But it’s currently unclear what Long as IRS Commissioner will mean for taxpayers, he said.

Long’s confirmation comes amid widespread IRS cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The hiring freeze, deferred resignation programs and reductions in force “will have significant impacts” on IRS operations, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, or TIGTA, said in a June 6 report.

A separate TIGTA report from May found the agency had lost nearly one-third of its so-called revenue agents, who conduct audits, as of March 2025.

The “tax gap” — federal levies incurred but not paid voluntarily on time — was estimated at $696 billion for tax year 2022, according to the latest IRS data.

When asked about the tax gap, Long answered in written testimony: “My goal is to modernize and streamline the IRS, so we are collecting the maximum amount owed each year.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget request calls for a 37% reduction in IRS spending, including staffing and technology cuts. These reductions could impact revenue collections, according to a Budget Lab at Yale analysis.

In a May House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said “collections” were among his IRS priorities. He said “smarter IT” and the “AI boom” could help meet revenue goals.

In 2022, Congress approved nearly $80 billion in IRS funding, with more than half earmarked for enforcement of corporate and high-net-worth tax dodgers. That funding has since been targeted by Republicans.

As the agency faces cuts, it could also soon see more administrative work once Republicans enact sweeping tax changes via Trump’s big beautiful spending bill.

For example, one provision would require precertification of each qualifying child for filers claiming the earned income tax credit. This could be challenging amid staffing cuts, experts say.

Renting is taking off in the suburbs as homeownership remains out of reach for many would-be buyers.

Between 2018 and 2023, rentership surged by at least 5 percentage points in 11 out of 20 suburbs surrounding the largest U.S. metro areas, according to a recent analysis by Point2Homes, a rental market research company.

During the same period, 15 suburbs went from being predominantly composed of homeowners to majority-renter communities. The trend spans fast-growing Sun Belt metros like Dallas, Houston and Miami as well as Northeastern cities like Boston and Philadelphia.

In five of those top 20 metro areas — Dallas, Minneapolis, Boston, Tampa and Baltimore — the suburbs are gaining renters faster than the urban centers they surround, Point2Homes found. The share of residents who rent surged in the Dallas suburbs by 17.6% from 2018 to 2023, while that rate rose just 7.9% in the city itself — with the nearby suburbs of Frisco, McKinney and Grand Prairie each gaining over 5,000 renter households apiece during that period.

Back in 2018, it was harder to buy a home in Dallas County, where most of the city sits, than it was in the metro area’s more suburban counties, like those including Frisco, McKinney and Grand Prairie — suburbs where the ranks of renters have swelled faster than virtually anywhere else, Point2Homes found. That’s no longer the case: Homebuying is now more difficult in the suburban counties surrounding Dallas than it is in Dallas County itself, the NBC News Home Buyer Index shows.

Housing affordability is a nationwide problem spanning cities and suburbs alike.

Mortgage costs have risen sharply since the pandemic, pricing out many prospective buyers in all sorts of in-demand areas. Average interest rates on the popular 30-year fixed home loan currently hover just under 7%, levels not seen since before the 2008 financial crisis. In a market this tough, some housing experts say the proliferation of rental properties has helped keep suburban lifestyles accessible to people who otherwise couldn’t afford them.

“You have your own land, you have kids or you have a dog, and you want that space,” said N. Edward Coulson, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the director of its Center for Real Estate. “They get all that amenity from having a single-family home.”

Mark, a suburbanite just outside Chicago who asked to be identified by his first name to avoid professional blowback for weighing in on hot-button housing issues, said the type of property he has rented for three years is out of budget for him to buy. He estimated many comparable properties in the area would cost 30% more in monthly housing payments than his current rent, and he’s considering leaving the area so he can purchase someplace else.

“If I want to stay here, it’s basically not tenable,” Mark said.

Andrew Decker, a renter in Lake Villa, Illinois, halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee, said he and his family would love to buy the property where they live now, which he said was offered to him for $340,000.

“We would like to make it our forever home if we could afford it, but it’s just so expensive,” Decker said. “If they were to come at me and tell me that, ‘Hey, you can buy this house for 200 grand today,’ I’d pull the trigger tomorrow. I wouldn’t even hesitate. But 340’s crazy.”

Tara Raghuveer, who runs the tenant advocacy group Tenant Union Federation, said affordability issues that have fueled the suburban rental boom threaten to push people farther from urban cores.

“As people are moved out of the city, they’re further from transportation, they might be further from employment, they might be living in homes that are not necessarily connected to other people like them, which impacts things like child care, Social Security,” Raghuveer said.

Landlords, however, tout the benefits that come from renting in the ‘burbs.

“The ability to have one payment that covers all your expenses generally — you don’t have to deal with the mortgage payment and the home insurance and maybe the HOA and then a lot of maintenance expense, so on — has been something that for a lot of people has been worth it,” said George Ratiu, vice president of research at the National Apartment Association trade group, which represents rental operators.

Developers have also been building different types of properties for suburban tenants, including multifamily complexes. Jay Parsons, a housing economist and host of “The Rent Roll” podcast, points to the rise of “suburban downtowns,” partly fueled by the pandemic-era shift to remote work. These mixed-use developments are typically aimed at offering younger families a balance between urban convenience and suburban amenities, he said.

“You can still be close to your job. You can be close to nice restaurants and shops but live in a suburban area where you’re still using a car, and you still have probably a rent that’s more affordable than living in most downtowns,” Parsons said.

Coulson doesn’t expect the appeal of the suburbs to fade anytime soon, which could prop up prices in many of them for buyers and renters alike.

“If you work downtown, it’s still an advantage to live downtown, but it’s not as great an advantage” as it used to be, he said, now that remote work remains commonplace — despite an ongoing drumbeat of return-to-office mandates. “What that does is also raise the cost of living in the suburbs, because now more people want to live in the suburbs.”

“That’s a dynamic that’s going to have to work itself out a little bit more before we know the final impact on suburban versus downtown pricing,” he said.

The U.S. Department of Education planned for the Treasury Department to take a hand in managing the country’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio, recent court documents show.

“The Department had been negotiating a memorandum of understanding with the Treasury Department regarding student loan management,” Rachel Oglesby, the chief of staff at the Education Dept., said in a court declaration filed late on Tuesday.

The agreement involved moving nine Education Dept. employees from the agency’s Federal Student Aid Default Collections Unit to Treasury “to discuss collections activities,” a spokesperson for the Education Department told CNBC.

Education Department plans with the Treasury Department are now on hold after U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Boston blocked the Trump administration on May 22 from its efforts to dismantle the Education Department.

Joun ordered the department to rehire the more than 1,300 employees affected by mass layoffs in March, and blocked the department from transferring student loans to the Small Business Administration.

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Experts say the Treasury talks are more evidence that the Trump administration hopes to reduce the role of the Education Department.

President Donald Trump said on March 21 that the Small Business Administration, instead of the Education Department, would handle the country’s debt.

“They’re all set for it,” the president said of the SBA, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “They’re waiting for it.”

At the time of Trump’s announcement that student loans would move to the SBA, experts had said the next most logical agency would have been Treasury, since it already plays a role in collecting past-due debts from Americans through the Treasury Offset Program.

Still, financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz pointed out that The Higher Education Act of 1965 is “very clear” that the Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office is “responsible for student loans.”

“It will require an act of Congress,” Kantrowitz said, to move the loans to either the SBA or Treasury.

Consumer advocates express worries that the mass transfer of accounts to another agency could trigger errors, or compromise borrowers’ privacy. They also raised concerns about how a change in agency might affect unique student loan protections, and programs such as Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

More than 42 million Americans hold federal student loans.