Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) recently fired 7,000 IRS employees, a move that is expected to cause chaos at the agency that is in charge with processing income tax returns. This could mean problems with more complicated returns that require taxpayers to contact the IRS – a difficult thing on a good day but a dreadful proposition when the agency is short staffed during tax season. More importantly for millions of Americans, this could mean delays in receiving refund checks.
The question to ask is “Why do this now?”. These 7,000 employees won’t make a dent in the trillion dollars the Trump administration has said they’re trying to cut from the federal budget. Why not wait until after tax season, after most Americans have gotten their income tax refunds?
According to Michael Kaercher, Deputy Director of the Tax Law Center at NYU in a Time magazine article: “Most of the IRS employees laid off worked in tax compliance, which raises revenue by preventing tax fraud.” “These misguided layoffs will hurt everyday Americans who pay their taxes and count on the IRS to pay refunds on time while encouraging wealthy people and large businesses to cheat on their taxes”, according to a post on X by the Tax Law Center at NYU.
OK, so it seems the motivation for these firings is to advantage the same “top 1%” that Trump’s long-promised tax cut will, even if it hurts everyday Americans.