A Facebook post claimed it would be cheaper to put a police officer in every American public school than to 'hire 87,000 IRS agents.' The most reliable data sources suggest that's flawed. It also doesn’t account for staffing variables.
Using these figures to apply the math posited in the post, it would cost about $6.96 billion to pay the salaries of one police officer per public school.Congress has approved $80 billion for the IRS to hire as many as 87,000 employees over the next 10 years. That comes as the agency prepares for 50,000 employees to retire over the next five or six years.
However, if the IRS were hiring 87,000 tax"agents," the cost of those salaries could come in around $6.04 billion. By that math, it would cost about $920 million more to put a police officer in every school than it would to pay for 87,000 IRS agents. The post relies on unofficial data about salaries and schools. Using official data sources and applying the math used in this post, we found that it would cost about $920 million more to put an officer in every school — not $1.7 billion less. But either way, the claim involves back-of-the-envelope math based on averages and doesn’t account for real-world variables.