Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan to permanently boost the Internal Revenue Service’s budget was probably going to be a tough sell, even before people starting picking apart the bad math behind her scheme.

But what may have killed the plan outright was a recent ProPublica story that was supposedly based on several years-worth of private IRS filings from the nation’s wealthiest individuals. Setting aside the activism masquerading as reporting in that piece, there’s the question of the data it was based on.

That information – all of it – is confidential. How did those private documents find their way in reporters’ hands? The Wall Street Journal says that is the “real scandal:”

This still leaves the real scandal, which is that someone leaked confidential IRS information about individuals to serve a political agenda. This is the same tax agency that pursued a vendetta against conservative nonprofit groups during the Obama Administration. Remember Lois Lerner ?

This is also the same IRS that Democrats now want to infuse with $80 billion more to chase a fanciful amount of uncollected taxes. As part of this effort, Mr. Biden wants the IRS to collect “gross inflows and outflows on all business and personal accounts from financial institutions.” Why? So the information can be leaked to ProPublica?

The IRS says it has begun an investigation into the tax-return disclosure, and by all means send the guilty to prison. But Congress should also not trust the IRS with any more power and money than it already has.

And even that may be too much.