A tearful executive at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) informed staff that approximately 6,000 employees would be laid off. The layoffs, representing about 6% of the agency’s workforce, come during the peak of the busy tax-filing season.
The cuts are part of President Donald Trump’s broader effort to downsize the federal government, targeting a range of agencies including the IRS, bank regulators, forest services, and space programs.
Leading the initiative is tech billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s top campaign donor, who has championed aggressive reductions in government staffing.
During the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Musk received a chainsaw from Argentine President Javier Milei—famous for using the tool as a symbol of radical spending cuts. Holding the chainsaw aloft, Musk declared it the “chainsaw for bureaucracy,” underscoring the administration’s intent to slash federal jobs dramatically.
Labor unions have filed lawsuits to block the mass firings, but a federal judge in Washington ruled on Thursday that the layoffs could proceed for now.
On a call with employees, Christy Armstrong, the IRS director of talent acquisition, became emotional while breaking the news. She told staff that approximately 6,000 of their colleagues would lose their jobs and encouraged them to support one another, according to an employee on the call. “She was pretty emotional,” the worker said.
The layoffs, expected to total 6,700 employees, primarily affect workers hired during the Biden administration’s expansion of IRS enforcement targeting wealthy taxpayers. The IRS’s workforce had grown from 80,000 in 2021 to around 100,000 under Biden, but the new administration has reversed course.
Republicans have long criticized the IRS expansion, arguing it would lead to increased scrutiny of ordinary Americans. Independent budget analysts, however, had projected that the Biden-era staff increase would boost government revenue and help reduce the deficit by strengthening enforcement against tax evasion by the wealthy.
“This ensures the IRS won’t go after the wealthy and will instead focus on low-income individuals,” said Philip Hackney, a former IRS lawyer and tax law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “It’s a travesty.”
The affected employees include revenue agents, customer-service representatives, appeals specialists, and IT staff across all 50 states, sources revealed. The IRS has declined to comment on the matter.
To mitigate the disruption during tax season, the agency plans to retain several thousand critical workers needed to process the more than 140 million individual tax returns expected by the April 15 filing deadline, according to a source.
The Trump administration’s layoffs have largely targeted newer federal employees, who typically have fewer job protections than their more tenured counterparts.
