The Internal Revenue Service on Thursday began firing employees in a massive layoff ordered by the Trump administration, federal workers said, shaking the foundations of the tax agency during filing season.
About 7,000 employees were expected to lose their jobs, according to a person familiar with the decision, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. That’s 7 percent of the roughly 100,000-person agency. Most of the cuts, about 5,000, came in the enforcement and collections section of the tax service, the person said.
Many of the laid-off employees were part of a recent hiring surge meant to improve service and update technology at the agency, which has seen its budget reduced repeatedly since 2010. Taxpayer advocates and Democrats said the loss of several thousand employees could hamstring the agency’s ability to help taxpayers during the filing season, which ends April 15. Losing those workers, critics said, also could jeopardize initiatives that the agency undertook to improve collections, such as increased audits of wealthy people and stricter enforcement of rules governing certain businesses.
The IRS and Treasury Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Plans for IRS layoffs emerged last week. The job cuts are part of a sweeping effort steered by billionaire Elon Musk and the U.S. DOGE Service, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, to remake the federal government and reduce its workforce. Thousands of probationary employees have been laid off at the National Park Service and at agencies that work on veterans affairs, health and human services, and disease prevention. About 75,000 employees accepted buyouts through a “deferred resignation” program that closed earlier this month. Administration officials have also dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, to stop nearly all its work.
Managers were crying Thursday at an IRS campus in New Orleans, said David Carrone, a revenue agent and president of the Louisiana/Arkansas National Treasury Employees Union chapter. Elsewhere, IRS workers who had been told to come to their offices and return their equipment sat and waited for termination notices, employees told The Washington Post.
Carrone’s daughter, Elizabeth, was one of those laid off.
She started as a revenue agent in New Orleans last year, a position she considered a dream job after seeing her dad’s nearly 40-year career with the agency, she said. She bought a house and never expected to be unemployed.
“I told multiple people [that] I thought this was my last job,” she said.
But on Thursday morning, she got a note well after she had been locked out of her work computer — saying she was terminated effective that day, she said. She doesn’t know what will happen to the roughly 30 cases she was working on, and she isn’t sure about what she will do next, though she said may go to work at an accounting firm.
Later Thursday, some probationary employees who still had not received a termination notice were told to go home and wait for a notice to be mailed to them, workers said.
Probationary workers had done nothing to justify losing their jobs and had little time to prepare, said Shannon Ellis, president of the National Treasury Employees Union’s Kansas City chapter, before the layoffs were announced. Some may not know how to get needed medications without health insurance or might struggle to make mortgage payments, she said.