Thousands of people were fired from the IRS this week in the thick of tax season.
Most of those fired were "probationary" workers, people typically having served in their roles for under two years. The cuts are part of the Trump administration's widespread efforts to downsize the federal workforce, led by Elon Musk and the billionaire's deputies at the Department of Government Efficiency.
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The layoffs affect roughly 6%-7% of the agency's 100,000-person workforce. Those fired were mostly outside the Washington, D.C., area, with thousands of employees losing their jobs from offices located in Florida, Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas, according to ABC News.
The Trump administration has defended the mass firings, with Kevin Hassett, director of the president's National Economic Council, saying, "There are more than 100,000 people working to collect taxes, and not all of them are fully occupied."
The layoffs come in the middle of tax season, and experts have warned that the cuts will make it harder for taxpayers to get questions answered and even for the government to collect taxes.
The IRS has already been strapped for resources in recent years; in 2023, 9-in-10 customer service phone calls went unanswered, according to NPR.
"We can expect Americans to experience a return to slower refunds, to longer waits on hold, to dropped calls," Vanessa Williamson, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, told reporters on Thursday. "It's going to be a real impact on customer service right as taxes are due this year."
The exact impacts the firings will have on the 2025 tax season is unclear. A former IRS commissioner told ABC News that it is "unrealistic" to think mass firings during tax season would still allow for the process to run smoothly.
"The bottom line: Forever, it has been an absolute rule of thumb that you keep things stable during filing season. Because it's delicate," the former commissioner said. "And the idea that nearly 10% of the entire IRS workforce is being laid off right in the middle of filing season is extremely risky."
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The union representing IRS workers has asked a judge to halt the firings.
"Indiscriminate firings of IRS employees around the country are a recipe for economic disaster," said Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union. "Much of the IRS workforce is outside of the Washington, D.C., area, which means these layoffs are disrupting their local economies and hurting middle-income families in every state."