Thousands more Federal employees have been fired over the past week, with almost 7,000 employees at the IRS losing their jobs amid tax filing season.
Those cuts boost the total of Federal employee firings and deferred resignations to about 94,000, or about 3.9 percent of the Federal civilian workforce at the beginning of the second Trump administration.
According to multiple reports, the Trump administration began firing about 6,700 employees at the IRS on Thursday. The cuts are focused on probationary employees and about 5,000 of the fired employees were a part of the agency’s compliance teams.
Probationary status typically indicates someone who has been working in the Federal government for less than two years – before full civil service protections kick in.
Democratic senators warned that the cuts at the IRS could have a “catastrophic impact” on the current filing season. In a Feb. 18 letter, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Senate Finance Committee Ranking member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and seven Senate Finance Democrats wrote that the mass layoffs and hiring freeze will inevitably “delay refunds and degrade taxpayer service.”
In a separate statement on Thursday, Sen. Wyden said the “IRS layoffs will hobble tax enforcement among the ultra-wealthy.”
“As a result of these layoffs, the burden of tax enforcement will be skewed much more toward working families and small businesses,” Sen. Wyden said.
“I’m extremely concerned that these layoffs are a backdoor way for Republicans to shut down the free Direct File program and put American taxpayers back at the mercy of the tax software giants who’ve been ripping them off for too long,” he added.
The layoffs come after the Biden administration prioritized bolstering the IRS’s workforce and modernizing its legacy tech systems.
Congress provided the IRS with about $79 billion in additional funding over a 10-year period in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to help with modernization efforts. However, Congress rescinded $20 billion of that funding in 2023, and it recently repealed another $20 billion when it approved the latest continuing resolution funding bill in December.
“Even with all the automation and all the technology that we’re investing in to make taxpayers have a much more digital and easier experience, even with all of that, we still need about 6,000 or 7,000 more employees to make sure that we don’t have moments [where] we have 400 people showing up and can only serve 300,” former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said back in May 2024.
In addition to the IRS layoffs, other agencies including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) also laid off many of their probationary employees this past week.
DHS moved to fire over 400 employees on Feb. 14, including over 130 cuts within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
According to Axios, NIST is preparing to cut 497 people, gutting the U.S. AI Safety Institute and most staff working at NIST’s Chips for America program.
MeriTalk has previously reported on other layoffs tallying over 12,000 Federal employees.
The major layoffs include about 5,200 probationary employees targeted across the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 1,000 employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs, 3,400 probationary employees at the U.S. Forest Service, about 1,000 probationary employees at the National Park Service, and as many as 2,000 employees at the Energy Department.
Other agencies that have fired their probationary employees include the Federal Aviation Administration, Small Business Administration, Office of Personnel Management, Education Department, General Services Administration, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) – the largest Federal employee union – called the mass firings “reckless.”
“These firings are not about poor performance – there is no evidence these employees were anything but dedicated public servants. They are about power. They are about gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said.
