Joe Biden invited millions of people into this country illegally and handed them your wallet.
Now Scott Bessent just found the thirty-year-old scam that made it possible – and the name behind it will make your jaw drop.
What he announced Wednesday saves you $3 billion, and the story of who kept this running should make you furious.
The Giveaway Washington Didn't Want You to Notice
Here is how the con worked.
Four tax credits – the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, the American Opportunity Tax Credit, and the Adoption Tax Credit – are refundable.
Refundable means if the credit is bigger than what you owe in taxes, the government writes you a check for the difference.
Congress created those credits for struggling American families.
The IRS spent decades mailing the checks to anyone who filed, legal status be damned.
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A 2011 Inspector General report caught the IRS handing out more than $4 billion in refundable tax credits to illegal aliens.
Congress raised hell.
The IRS shrugged.
The checks kept going out.
By 2015, a single address was receiving 24,000 ITIN-linked payments – and Inspector General auditors found IRS management was focused solely on processing volume, with no interest in whether the applications were fraudulent.
Clinton Broke the Law He Signed. Trump Is Fixing It.
This scam has a specific villain, and his name is Bill Clinton.
Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 – a bipartisan law with one clear purpose: illegal aliens do not get federal benefits, period.
Clinton signed it, then immediately worked to gut it.
His White House – with the help of a young staffer named Elena Kagan, who later became a Supreme Court Justice – invented a legal distinction between "mandatory" and "discretionary" benefits.
Their scheme: the ban only applied to mandatory programs.
Refundable tax credits? Discretionary.
Keep the checks flowing.
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No administration in the thirty years that followed reversed that interpretation.
Until Scott Bessent.
On Wednesday, the Treasury and the IRS proposed regulations formally classifying the refunded portions of those four tax credits as federal public benefits under PRWORA – which means only citizens and legal residents can collect them.
It makes the law mean what it says.
"American taxpayers should not be forced to foot the bill for benefits going to those who are barred by law from receiving them," Bessent said. "These proposed regulations end the abuse, protect the integrity of the tax system, and put Americans first."
Nearly one million people currently collecting these refunds will be cut off.
This Is What Actually Draining the Swamp Looks Like
The Left will call this cruel.
They will find a sympathetic face and put it on television.
They will not tell you about the 24,000 payments going to one address.
They will not tell you about the $4 billion Inspector General's report that the Obama IRS ignored.
They will not tell you that Clinton's people intentionally broke a law he signed the moment the Democrat base threw a fit about it.
What Bessent did is not a new policy.
It is enforcement of a thirty-year-old law that every Democrat administration since Clinton actively sabotaged.
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The EITC alone grew from $2.1 billion in 1985 to $68.5 billion by 2015 – a 3,162 percent increase – partly because nobody in Washington was willing to ask who was actually cashing those checks.
Here is what makes Bessent's move significant beyond the $3 billion: he didn't need new legislation.
He read the law Clinton signed, recognized that Clinton's own lawyers had twisted it into meaninglessness, and reversed thirty years of deliberate non-enforcement with a single regulatory filing.
That is what a competent government looks like.
Sources:
- Scott Bessent, "Treasury, IRS Propose Rules to Protect Refundable Tax Credits from Abuse by Illegal Aliens," U.S. Department of the Treasury, August 19, 2026.
- "Treasury Chief Bessent Declares Illegal Immigrants Should Not Receive Certain Tax Credit Refunds," Just the News, August 19, 2026.
- R. Fishman, "A 1996 Law Prevented Migrants from Getting Welfare – It's Been Ignored for 30 Years," Center for Immigration Studies, September 21, 2025.
- R. Fishman, "Trump DOJ Undoes Clinton Sabotage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law," Center for Immigration Studies, December 19, 2025.
- "Estimating Illegal Immigrant Receipt of Cash Payments from the EITC and ACTC," Center for Immigration Studies, May 13, 2021.
- Fox News, "Groups Want Trump to Close Loophole Allowing Illegal Immigrants to Abuse Tax Credits," Fox News.
