Top Treasury tax official Ken Kies leaves government amid IRS leadership gap

Ken Kies is leaving the government after a little more than a year in dual roles that put him at the center of tax policy at Treasury and the IRS. His departure removes the administration’s top tax policy official at the Department of the Treasury and its acting chief counsel at the Internal Revenue Service at a moment when the rules for Republicans’ 2025 tax cuts are still being written.

Kies had served as Treasury’s assistant secretary for tax policy since his Senate confirmation in 2025, while also acting as chief counsel at the IRS. In that pair of jobs, he became the administration’s point person on tax policy and led the effort to produce the regulations needed to carry out the tax cuts enacted by Republicans in 2025. It was not immediately clear when he was leaving or why.

The vacancy matters because Kies sat at the intersection of Treasury’s policy shop and the IRS’s legal machinery. Any delay in replacing him could slow the regulations, reshape which provisions move first, and give new weight to other officials inside the administration who now have to steer tax implementation without him. An administration official praised Kies for helping with the Trump administration’s Working Families Tax Cuts, the implementation of what the administration calls the most successful tax season, and Trump Accounts.

The IRS leadership gap widened after President Donald Trump nominated Jim Gadwood, a tax controversy attorney, to be IRS chief counsel on June 23, 2026. An IRS Chief Counsel notice dated that same day said Kenneth J. Kies would continue serving as acting chief counsel pending Gadwood’s confirmation. But a prior IRS notice dated June 17, 2026 said Kies’s acting chief counsel authority had expired that day under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and that no one may serve as acting chief counsel until the president names a nominee.

That dispute sits inside a broader standoff over who is actually running the IRS. Senate Democrats said the agency entered the 2026 filing season without Senate-confirmed leadership. A Senate Finance Committee letter said the IRS has been in a leadership vacuum since Trump removed Commissioner Billy Long on August 8, 2025, and that the administration created a day-to-day IRS CEO role Congress never authorized.

Kies’s exit now leaves Treasury without the official driving tax policy and leaves the IRS’s top legal post unsettled again, just as the administration faces pressure to turn political promises on taxes into binding regulations.