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By Nathan Layne and Tim Reid
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than 22,000 employees at the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service have accepted the Trump administration's latest buyout offer, two agency sources said on Tuesday.
The move this month, called a deferred resignation program, offers workers full pay and benefits until September 30, with most being told they won't have to work during their final months.
The voluntary resignation program was offered to federal workers this month and, like one announced in January, would let those who accept to go on leave with pay until September 30.
The IRS, which had about 100,000 employees when President Donald Trump began his second White House term on January 20, fired 7,000 probationary employees earlier this year, with another 5,000 having left in the past three months.
Fiscal watchdog groups have warned that losing so many workers will hamper the agency's tax processing and collection less efficient, potentially depriving the U.S. government of significant revenue. The U.S. federal government ran a $1.83 trillion deficit last year, which helped to drive the national debt past $36.6 trillion.
"I worry that this Administration’s destructive initiatives at IRS will cost the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue while putting taxpayer services and privacy at risk," Chye-Ching Huang, executive director of the nonpartisan Tax Law Center at New York University, said in a statement.
The upcoming departures are part of other mass layoffs and buyouts across government agencies by Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. They say they want to drastically reduce the cost and size of the federal bureaucracy, arguing it is bloated and inefficient.
To date around 200,000 workers have left the 2.3 million-strong civilian federal workforce through an earlier buyout offer, layoffs and resignations.
Members of Musk's DOGE team have been inside the IRS for weeks, accessing the agency's tax collecting databases. Musk has said one of DOGE's core missions is to root out waste and fraud in multiple government agencies, including at the IRS.
Former Democratic President Joe Biden's administration increased the IRS workforce by 20,000, arguing that it would raise the amount of tax the government collected.
(Reporting by Nathan Layne and Tim Reid; Editing by Scott Malone and Cynthia Osterman)
