A Former Fed for President

There's an interesting twist to this year's presidential campaign: In an era when support for government is at a historic low, a former federal employee is running for president. But not many people seem to be aware of that fact because the candidate isn't exactly trumpeting the experience.

That candidate is Michele Bachmann.

Bachman's official bio says she "spent five years as a federal tax litigation attorney, working on hundreds of civil and criminal cases. That experience solidified her strong support for efforts to simplify the tax code and reduce tax burdens on family and small business budgets." What the bio doesn't say explicitly was that Bachmann's tax work was at the Internal Revenue Service.

Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker reports this week that after getting a master's of law in taxation from the College of William and Mary in 1988, Bachmann spent four years as a lawyer at the IRS Office of Chief Counsel in St. Paul. There, he writes, her job involved "representing the commissioner of the IRS before the U.S. Tax Court and advising agents who were conducting audits and collecting tax assessments."

Lizza interviewed six of Bachmann's former co-workers in the small office where she worked. Mostly, their recollections of her centered on the times she wasn't in the office:

Two of Bachmann's five children were born while she worked for the IRS, and all six former colleagues said that the primary fact they remembered about Bachmann was that she spent a good portion of her time on maternity leave--the IRS had a fairly generous policy--and that caused resentment.

"Basically, the rest of us that were here were handling Michele's inventory," one former colleague said. "In her four years, she probably didn't get more than two, two and a half years of experience. So she was doing lightweight stuff." A second colleague said, "She was an attorney here, but she was never here." (Bachmann declined a request to respond.)

Some have accused Bachmann of being less than forthcoming in characterizing her work for Uncle Sam. What's certainly true is that her experience didn't make her an advocate for expanding the bureaucracy. Quite the opposite: Bachmann's bio describes her as "a champion of Tea Party values including the call for lower taxes, renewed focus on the Constitution and the need to shrink the size of government." It declares that she is "a staunch opponent of wasteful government spending" who "believes government has grown exponentially," with the recent health care reform legislation "being the most recent example of its uninhibited growth."