The Trump administration’s efforts to slash the size of government are coming to the Internal Revenue Service in the form of thousands of layoffs.

Employees of the tax agency were notified of the layoffs Thursday. It is expected that roughly 6,000 jobs will be cut, and they are mostly expected to impact “probationary” laborers who have been hired in the last year. 

Consequently, Politico notes that the types of jobs that will mostly be eliminated involve enforcement positions, as those are the types of positions that are filled in the run-up to tax season. 

A representative from the IRS did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.

The cuts come as the Department of Government Efficiency is seeking to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget. However, they also come as the agency has been trying to resolve longstanding staffing shortages that have led to long wait times for Americans trying to get help filing their taxes.

In 2022, NPR reported that nine out of ten phone calls to the IRS were not answered, and the average wait time was 27 minutes.

In 2023, it hired 5,000 new employees and the answer rate for phone calls increased to between 80 and 90 percent. Meanwhile, the wait time was slashed to four minutes, which the agency touted as a success.

However, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation cast doubt on that success story in a 2024 letter to the House Ways and Means Committee. The letter noted that while the percentage of answered calls surged, it also corresponded with the number of calls to the IRS plunging to just 25.9 million in 2023 from 63.7 million in 2022. 

Those new positions that were supposedly behind the increase in the percentage of phone calls being answered were able to be filled in part thanks to $80 billion in funding for the agency that was part of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. That bill drew the ire of conservatives who focused on one part of a 2021 Treasury report that stated the IRS could hire nearly 87,000 full-time employees over the next decade.

Republicans implied that the funds would be used to hire an army of new IRS agents almost overnight. However, the $80 billion is scheduled to be spent over ten years. Between 2021 and 2024, the agency hired roughly 20,000 new employees, bringing its total workforce to just more than 100,000. 

Still, Republicans have used the figure as a political punching bag and a symbol of bloated government spending. In January, President Trump told supporters the IRS “hired, or tried to hire 80,000 workers” and suggested that they should be sent to help secure the southern border. 

The cuts could hinder some tax collection efforts, but they could also impact Americans’ ability to get their questions answered if customer service jobs are cut, although Politico notes the IRS is “wary of reducing taxpayer-service personnel” through the end of tax season on April 15. 

Some employees at the agency have not been shy about voicing their displeasure with the cuts. One employee who worked at the IRS’ Denver office, Osvaldo Delgado, told Fox 31, “They’re firing people; I thought we were short-staffed, and now you’re firing us? That makes no sense.”

However, the idea of shrinking the IRS appears to be popular. A YouGov poll released on February 19 found that 16 percent of Americans think the tax agency should be expanded, 34 percent think it should stay the same. Meanwhile, 22 percent think it should be reduced, and 13 percent think it should be eliminated. 

Whether Americans think the agency should be eliminated or not, they have listed it as the agency they have the most negative views of for years. A poll conducted by Pew Research in 2013 found that the IRS was the least popular agency as 51 percent of Americans had a negative view of the agency while 44 percent had a positive view.

More than a decade later, Americans’ views have not changed much. A Pew poll released in August 2024 found that 50 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view, 38 percent have a favorable view, and 12 percent were undecided.