My take is that it's not that they were prioritizing the wrong stuff, but that they only had the tools to tackle the easy cases for awhile. It's comparatively easy to write a program that calculates basic errors on a tax return that takes the standard deduction--I've made mistakes and gotten a check in the mail a few months later that probably required little or no human intervention. But to really do the math for high income earners is a lot harder. I found another article in my search that talked about new programs with the IRA money focused on using AI to speed up the process.

I certainly don't pretend to know the answers on all of this, but I do get particularly irritated when people make sweeping generalizations about the stuff that goes on in government. I watched my mother, father, and step-father in those jobs my entire childhood and it always way more complicated than people think. Seeing that they are prioritizing the right stuff now and that the extra money is paying for itself, it's pretty frustrating to hear the peanut gallery criticize them for doing it wrong all those years before.