Thousands of IRS employees poised to be let go — right as tax season ramps up: report​

The Trump administration is preparing to lay off thousands of "probationary" employees working for the Internal Revenue Service, reported The New York Times on Friday afternoon.

"The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources department, ordered agencies across the government this week to terminate probationary employees, who are relatively new to their positions and do not enjoy as much job protection," reported Andrew Duehren and Alan Rappeport.

The development comes as litigation has already started on more established civil servants being suspended and offered buyouts as part of tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency task force.

The exact number of IRS employees affected by the order remains unknown. However, per the report, "A sudden drop in the number of employees at the I.R.S. could interfere with the agency’s work to process millions of Americans’ tax returns."

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Moreover, the order appears to contradict claims made by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who "said in an interview with Bloomberg News last week that the department, which oversees the I.R.S., would limit changes until after tax season ends in the spring" — although possibly laid off IRS employees could be kept on until then.

Republicans have systematically starved the IRS of funding when they have had control of Congress. Part of former President Joe Biden's signature Inflation Reduction Act called for the hiring of 87,000 new personnel to staff the agency, many of whom would be taking over for older and retiring individuals — in the name of helping the agency run more efficiently and audit more high-income tax cases, which are more expensive to investigate. The GOP has made reversing this new funding a top priority.

Trump, who himself was under audit for years and fought to conceal his questionable tax accounting practices from the public while running for president, has already signaled a war against the IRS. He has tapped former Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) to run the agency, despite his lack of experience in tax legislation and despite repeatedly introducing legislation to abolish the IRS outright. Musk has also boasted that he "deleted" the team of engineers who created the IRS' new "direct file" system that lets people file taxes for free without third-party middlemen.