What will a gutted IRS look like? The Internal Revenue Service—my own personal most-hated government agency—appears to be in hot water this tax season, mostly due to cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
You might recall that in 2021, the IRS was authorized to hire 87,000 new tax collectors and tax-related bureaucrats over the next decade, with an increase in funding sent their way by then-President Joe Biden. And in 2022, this became a political scandal (especially around these parts), because Biden and many of his Democratic bedfellows claimed that audit rates on households making $400,000 or less would not go up, just as some of them were cutting provisions in the actual legislation that tried to codify such assurances.
It's not clear they ever really did hire all those new agents and paper-filers; the IRS remains a little under 100,000 strong, hiring 19,482 total employees in fiscal year 2024. But the agency suffers from retention issues: About 10,000 employees left that same year.
