IRS employees expect to learn their layoff fate around Tax Day, their busiest time of the year

(CNN) — Internal Revenue Service workers are expecting to soon learn their employment fate, coinciding with Tuesday’s tax-filing deadline and their busiest week of the year.

Two sources familiar with the matter said the agency will begin to announce individual decisions by the end of this week, spelling out who is spared and who is being laid off as part of the Trump administration’s plans to significantly slash the IRS’ workforce.

IRS employees in Kansas City, Missouri; Atlanta; and Chicago — some of the agency’s largest hubs outside Washington — said anxiety has been building around the week surrounding Tax Day. Not only because of the mammoth workload, they said, but because they had heard this is when the cuts would be announced.

The reduction-in-force plans are expected to take effect in the coming weeks, one IRS manager, who requested anonymity to discuss private deliberations, told CNN. The Trump administration is eyeing as much as a 20% reduction of the agency’s workforce, which would mean cutting roughly 20,000 jobs, CNN previously reported.

The planned slimdown in staff will come just as the IRS is processing tens of millions of tax returns, refunds, extensions, collections and payment plans. Some at the agency believe the timing is more than a coincidence.

“It seems like the cruelty is the point,” one IRS employee said about the layoffs coming around Tuesday’s tax deadline, seen by the agency as its “Super Bowl.”

Already, more than 101 million returns have been received and nearly 68 million refunds have been sent out, according to the latest data made public Friday.

A spokesperson from the Treasury Department, which includes the IRS, said the ongoing reductions were needed to undo what they described as “wasteful Biden-era hiring surges” at the agency, which saw a staffing increase thanks to an $80 billion infusion in the last administration.

“Staffing reductions that are currently being considered at the IRS will be part of — and driven by — process improvements and technological innovations that will allow the IRS to collect revenue and serve taxpayers more effectively,” the spokesperson said, adding that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wants to ensure “efficiency is realized while providing the collections, privacy, and customer service the American people deserve.”

‘We want to put them in trauma’

As tens of thousands of federal workers have been laid off or issued immediate termination notifications as part of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s plan to cut spending and downsize the federal government, the timing of some layoff announcements has led to consternation.

Changes wrought by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have at times collided with critical work periods for specific agencies.

There are the IRS announcements around Tax Day. And plans to shutter the Department of Education came just ahead of a key deadline for college admissions and financial aid.

“The Trump Administration is working quickly to deliver on the American people’s Election Day mandate by slashing the waste, fraud, and abuse in our government without compromising critical services,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said when asked by CNN about the timing of these announcements. “The goal of every agency is to more efficiently and effectively serve the American people.”

Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and a longtime proponent of drastically shrinking the government, said in 2024 that he hoped to torment federal employees into quitting.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said at an event during Trump’s 2024 campaign, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down. … We want to put them in trauma.”

CNN has reported that across the federal government, the chaos and staffing cuts have spurred an uptick in stress, anxiety, and, in the words of one social worker who sees many federal workers, “total fear and demoralization.”

And for their part, congressional Republicans have prioritized cutting the IRS’ funds.

The IRS received an additional $80 billion under President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act with a goal to improve customer service and collect more tax revenue for the government. During the 2024 and 2025 budget years, Republicans rescinded at least half that funding, and they have suggested they’d go after the remainder in future negotiations.

Bessent, whose department oversees the IRS, knocked down earlier reports that the tax-collecting agency would be cut by half. But it remains unclear how much of the roughly 100,000-strong workforce will end up on the chopping block.

Alex Berman, an IRS employee and local leader for the National Treasury Employees Union, said his co-workers in the agency’s Philadelphia offices have been filled with anxiety as they wait to find out who is getting fired and who will survive.

“In addition to the betrayal of their years of faithful service that an unnecessary RIF represents, people are feeling a keener sense of betrayal that they’re not being dealt with honestly or fairly by the agency,” Berman said, referring to “reductions in force,” or RIFs as they are known inside the government. “Insult after insult, added to injury after injury.”

‘The timing is terrible’

In addition to the staffing cuts, the Trump administration is trying to coax employees into departing voluntarily with “deferred resignation” offers that provide financial incentives to quit. Other programs are encouraging older federal employees to retire early.

For the IRS, the deadline to accept this offer was Monday. This meant employees needed to grapple with the possibility that they might decline the resignation offer, only to see their position eliminated days later.

“The timing is terrible,” a senior IRS official told CNN. “It’s already a hot mess inside the IRS. Of all the times to be messing with things, really?”

The IRS spends months preparing before the height of tax season in April to ensure systems are locked down so things run smoothly. The IRS official said announcing layoffs during this “white-knuckle, hold-on-to-the-dials” period isn’t a good idea.

“It’s like going into your final practice before the Super Bowl, and then telling the players and staff that they’ll get texts during the practice about whether they’re fired or not,” the official said. “And whether you win or lose the big game, more people will then be fired.”

There are also concerns at the IRS that poor record-keeping about the buyouts could create problems down the road. The source said the Treasury Department and the IRS have separate lists for who has accepted the buyout offer, and there are some discrepancies.

“Every one of these rows in that spreadsheet is a real human,” the official said.

Preventing employee burnout

An office established to modernize the IRS’ technology systems and processes has already been shuttered, with no new technology introduced in its place. At an IRS processing center in Kansas City, staff described locked carts filled with confidential taxpayer paperwork beginning to crowd the public spaces as the returns pile up.

“Unless DOGE has a magic fix from their AI bots, there’s going to be a huge backlog probably worse than it was during Covid,” said one IRS employee who requested confidentiality for fear of retribution.

Asked about the situation at the Kansas City processing center, a Treasury spokesperson said, “Unfortunately, backlogs are simply business as usual at the IRS, especially around tax season.” They added this is why Bessent is implementing “new direction for efficiency and modernization.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the first Trump administration delayed the 2020 tax deadline. This gave consumers and businesses more time to get a handle on their finances as the economy temporarily cratered and gave the IRS staff more time to process returns during an anomalous year.

Managers have started to raise concerns internally about the agency being short-staffed.

During one meeting described to CNN, the IRS’ head of taxpayer experience moved to protect his division against burnout and overwork, which he said could lead to errors or more departures.

“I’m not going to make people more miserable by overloading them,” the official, Ken Corbin, told an internal meeting, according to an attendee who paraphrased his remarks. “If the (phone) lines are long, the lines are long. If the returns are slow, the returns are slow.”

CNN previously reported that as of mid-March, wait times on IRS customer service lines were holding steady compared with that point last year. The average wait time was three minutes for individuals and seven minutes for businesses.

In an internal memo titled “Showing grace and accomplishing the mission,” Corbin referenced the “atmosphere of change” at the organization and praised the “professionalism and expertise” of the workers in his division who work directly with taxpayers.

Corbin did not respond a request for comment.

A former IRS official told CNN that Corbin is seen as one of the few “strong” senior career executives remaining at the agency, after a mass exodus of resignations last week spurred by the IRS’ controversial data-sharing deal with immigration authorities.

“He has the most institutional knowledge and has served under multiple administrations,” the former official said. “There’s a lot of fear that they’ll go after him, now that tax season is winding down.”

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