In a major reversal from the Biden Administration’s plan to grow the IRS by tens of thousands of employees with an additional $80 billion in funding, the Trump Administration has managed to slash the IRS workforce by a whopping 25% in the first 6 months of the administration, a move many conservatives have celebrated.
As background, President Biden and his much-disliked administration raised the public’s ire when, as part of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, they moved to direct $80 billion more in funding to the Internal Revenue Service so that it could hire tens of thousands more employees and conduct yet more much-detested audits.
The Trump Administration campaigned, in part, on reversing that, a message that struck home with many conservatives who were frustrated by the Obama-era politicized weaponization of the IRS and its audit system and saw the moves by Biden as another move toward financial repression and tyranny. So far, the administration has done well in fulfilling those pledges.
In fact, data about the state of the IRS that was released in late July of 2025 shows that the administration has, so far, managed to slash the IRS workforce by nearly 26,000 people through the use of targeted firings, layoffs, and buyouts. All in all, that marks a 25% cut to the IRS workforce and a major step back from the Biden years.
The cuts are somewhat more substantial in such of the more detested branches of the IRS. For example, the tax examiners division of the service saw a 27% decline in its workforce under the Trump Administration, and the similarly disliked revenue agents division saw a 26% crash in its workforce.
Describing how it effected the major cuts in the report released on July 18, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration explained, “As part of its efforts to reduce the size of the federal government’s workforce, the IRS offered deferred resignation programs (DRP). These programs allowed federal employees to resign with pay through September 30, 2025, or later, if the employee’s retirement date was between October 1 and December 31, 2025. The IRS also offered Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA) and Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment (VSIP) to encourage employees to leave federal service. Additionally, in April 2025, the IRS began Reduction in Force (RIF) actions to further reduce its workforce.”
Further, the report noted that the vast majority of those who have left left as part of the various buyout offers made by the Trump Administration. 4,600 of those who have left did so under the initial January buyout offer, and another 17,000 were approved for voluntary early retirements. Most of the remainder left as part of other voluntary programs, with only a few hundred being pushed out by layoffs.
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The report did note, however, that The National Taxpayer Advocate examined the 25% staffing cuts and found that “to deliver a successful filing season, the IRS needs a sufficient number of trained employees to program its processing systems, develop and disseminate timely and clear guidance on tax law changes, answer telephone calls and process correspondence, among other things.”
Watch Fox Business comment on the cuts here: