Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said on Thursday that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent should resign before he complies with President Trump’s directive for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status.
In a thread on the social platform X, Summers warned of the broader implications of using the IRS to target political opponents.
“Any self-respecting Treasury Secretary would resign rather have the Department be complicit in the weaponization of the IRS against a political adversary of the President,” Summers wrote.
“Harvard will endure and it is far, far from perfect, but if this directive is not withdrawn, the Administration will have taken another substantial step away from the rule of law and democracy,” he continued.
The Treasury Department on Wednesday sent an inquiry to the IRS’s acting chief counsel, Andrew De Mello, asking the agency to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status, according to The Washington Post.
The official directive came one day after Trump floated the idea of revoking Harvard’s status in a post on his Truth Social platform, writing, “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’”
The development is the latest in the school’s public fallout with the Republican administration for refusing to comply with a list of its demands to maintain federal funds.
Summers said Bessent should be doing more to protect the IRS from political interference and warned that if he doesn’t, the result could be steep losses in the nation’s revenue.
“@SecScottBessent is derelict with respect to what may be his most important duty—maintaining law-based rights respecting our tax collection system. DOGE violating privacy rules, evisceration of enforcement capacity, politicization of leadership and now political intrusion into a specific taxpayer’s status,” he said, referring to Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
“The result will be revenue losses of a trillion dollars or more over the next decade. The erosion of American democracy has costs that cannot be priced,” he continued.
Summers hearkened back to the 1970s, when former President Nixon tried to pressure his Treasury secretary, George Shultz, to investigate his political enemies.
“George Shultz met his test by facing down President Richard Nixon when his staff tried to interfere with the IRS. Tragic that @SecScottBessent has not protected the IRS,” Summers wrote.
The Hill has reached out to the Treasury Department for comment.