Senators' Tax Loophole Requests Will Get Special Vault

At the National Archives, the massive repository in Washington that stores government records for safekeeping, visitors and staffers alike carry a card that tracks their movements. “We have guards with guns, too,” says Richard Hunt, head of legislative archives. These precautions aren’t quite good enough for a big secret Senate Finance Committee leaders want the archives to keep hidden from the public’s sight.

Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, and Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, are working on the first rewrite of the tax code since 1986. Instead of revising the existing tax law, they’re taking what they call a “blank slate” approach. They proposed sweeping away the tax code’s thousands of loopholes, then asked their colleagues to submit written requests for the deductions they want put back in, assuring them that the requests would be kept private. The response: silence. Senators didn’t want word to leak that they’d supported special tax breaks.