The Trump administration is moving toward its biggest round of federal government layoffs yet, with multiple federal agencies directed to submit layoff plans by March 13.
The federal downsizing process is being spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency — also called DOGE — which is being headed up Elon Musk in his capacity as a “special government employee.”
According to the Washington Post, the Social Security Administration has been ordered to cut its workforce in half, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could face up to a 90% reduction in staff. On Wednesday, in his first cabinet meeting, President Donald Trump expressed a desire to cut up to 65% of the staff at the Environmental Protection Agency; that number was later corrected as agency budget cuts, not staff reduction.
So-called probationary employees, mostly people hired within the last year or less, are already being let go at departments ranging from defense to energy to education and the Forest Service.
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But right now, with many Texans and Americans more broadly pulling together their paperwork for tax season, one planned staff reduction in particular is getting a lot of attention: Layoffs are already under way at the Internal Revenue Service.
The Post reports about 7,000 people, or 7% of the agency’s workforce, is expected to be affected. However, other outlets claim up to 15,000 IRS workers could lose their jobs.
Andrew Belnap, an assistant professor at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, said these layoffs will likely affect as many as 600 employees in the Austin IRS office, which is one of the biggest in the country.
Layoffs will impact departments from customer service to enforcement, Belnap said.
“The phone services are very heavily used,” he said. “The IRS got a lot of additional funding with the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act, and as part of that, they hired thousands of more customer service agents. They’ve tracked statistics on this, and they showed that the number of calls that they were answering, the time answering those went down significantly. So they have a lot more customer service agents now than they did a few years ago.”
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However, Belnap said he’s more concerned about the cuts to enforcement officers.
“I think this is certainly going to be a big issue, because the short answer is that we have plenty of studies showing that if enforcement goes down, tax compliance declines,” he said. “And this is a big problem. I could give you some numbers on how big of a problem it is, but I think we would certainly expect compliance to go down.”
For those worried about getting their refund checks, Belnap said much of that process is automated and shouldn’t be affected.
“The vast majority of Americans are e-filing. They’re using direct deposit. And the IRS is very efficient at processing those returns. They get refunds out typically within three weeks,” he said. “People who I think are in the small minority who are doing paper filing and are not using direct deposit, there is some manual effort from the IRS side here, and they could be affected.”
