Did These 68 Words Just Kill IRS Oversight of Dark Money?

In a vaguely worded section of a vast new law, Congress may have accidentally blocked the agency from supervising political groups.

—By Patrick Caldwell  | Wed Jan. 22, 2014 3:00 AM GMT

Congress rushed to pass a 1,524-page bill last week that funds government agencies for 2014. The bill—which President Obama signed into law last Friday—is full of minor measures that were slipped in to appease various members, but one small section could upend the Internal Revenue Service's ability to regulate political organizations hoping to become nonprofits. Tacked on as a symbolic effort to mollify conservatives' anti-IRS mania, the text is so overly vague that it could mean the dissolution of long-standing rules. Or nothing at all. No one's really sure.

"It's really hard to know if this is clever or just abysmal drafting," says Frances Hill, a tax law professor at the University of Miami School of Law.