In February 2025, the Internal Revenue Service had approximately 103,000 employees. By March, more than 11,400 of those workers had received termination notices as probationary employees or voluntarily resigned under the so-called “Fork in the Road” or Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). That’s 11% of the workforce, with more cuts on the way.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for significant reductions in the size and scope of the federal government workforce. But the tax agency has been a particular target.
As part of the early IRS cuts, 7,315 probationary employees received termination notices, and 4,128 employees were approved to accept the DRP. Plus, an additional 522 employees had applied for DRP approval as of the date of a recent report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). The report focused on the probationary employees identified for termination and those who voluntarily participated in the initial DRP.
Deferred Resignation Program
The deferred resignation program allowed federal employees to resign but retain all pay and benefits through September 30, 2025.
Employees who were working from home and accepted this offer were also exempted from any return-to-office requirements. Employees had until February 6 to opt into the program.
The IRS subsequently recalled some of these resigned workers to work, noting that specific, critical tax return filing season positions would be exempt from the DRP until May 15, 2025. Those who had previously accepted the offer and stopped working but fell within the exception were advised they would be told when to return to work.
Probationary Employees
In January 2025, the IRS, like other federal agencies, was asked to identify all employees on probationary periods. While probationary employees are often recent hires (meaning within the last one to two years), they don’t have to be—those who have been serving for years but were recently moved or promoted into a new position also qualify as probationary.
The IRS subsequently fired approximately 7,000 probationary employees in response to an executive order signed by President Trump on February 11, 2025. Following the order, the Office of Personnel Management advised various federal agencies, including the Department of the Treasury (which includes the IRS), to fire non-essential probationary employees.
Several legal challenges followed, and in March, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup for the Northern District of California ordered six agencies, including the Treasury Department, to rehire the employees. In his ruling, Alsup said the federal government was required to follow normal reduction in force (RIF) rules. The government appealed the ruling—that case is currently pending in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In the meantime, the matter was escalated to the U.S. Supreme Court, which paused Alsup’s order on administrative grounds. The unsigned Supreme Court order indicated that the group of unions and non-profit groups lacked standing to sue. Standing is a legal term that refers to your right to bring a lawsuit or have a court hear your case—to be heard, you typically have to show that another party has harmed you and that the only fix for that harm can be found in court. The idea is to ensure that matters that end up in court aren’t frivolous and are raised by the right parties. The Supreme Court’s order does not mean that it found the firings lawful, just that the wrong parties raised the issue in court.
(According to the IRS, before the Supreme Court’s decision, the probationary employees who received termination notices were reinstated and placed on administrative leave. According to TIGTA, it is unclear whether any probationary employees will remain reinstated or be terminated in a large-scale Reduction in Force.)
In March 2025, a federal court in Maryland ruled the probationary employees needed to be reinstated. Specifically, U.S. District Judge James Bredar granted a preliminary injunction to stop the firings of probationary federal workers in those localities. (That doesn’t mean the employees can’t be fired, but it does mean that the federal government has to follow already established procedures to do so.) The Supreme Court’s ruling in the California case does not apply here.
Further Reductions
The report did not include numbers from a second DRP (reportedly, over 23,000 employees applied for this one, and 13,124 were approved as of April 22, 2025) nor any planned Reductions in Force (RIFs).
Further reductions in the workforce are anticipated. In February 2025, the President signed an executive order that advised federal agencies to begin preparations to initiate large-scale RIFs.
Types Of Employees Impacted By The Cuts
TIGTA’s report indicates that the separations disproportionately impacted employees in certain positions. For example, approximately 31% of
revenue agents are no longer at the agency. An IRS Revenue Agent is an auditor of tax returns—they typically have a degree in accounting or a related field and receive additional tax training from the IRS. They may work with individual taxpayers as well as businesses.
TIGTA found that 18% of revenue officers are no longer at the IRS. An IRS Revenue Officer is not an auditor—they’re primarily focused on collections, including issuing liens and levies. IRS Revenue Officers are typically involved in working significant tax debts. According to former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, the median debt that an IRS Revenue Officer is seeking to collect is $110,000.
(IRS Revenue Agents and IRS Revenue Officers are both different from Special Agents who work criminal matters with IRS-Criminal Investigations. There are about 3,000 employees in CI—about 70% of whom are special agents, and only those special agents carry firearms.)
Business Units
Business units at the IRS were impacted at different rates. The IRS previously notified its workforce that it initiated a RIF for the Office of Civil Rights and Compliance (formerly the Office of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion). The communication indicated that approximately 5% of the office left through the DRP and attrition, with an additional 75% of the office to be reduced through a RIF. Later in April, the IRS announced that it had initiated a RIF for the Taxpayer Experience Office and the Office of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion in Taxpayer Services.
Additional cuts followed. The top six business units affected by the cuts are:
- The Human Capital Office (HCO) supports IRS employees with Human Resource topics.
- Information Technology (IT) supports IRS employees by delivering IT services and solutions.
- Large Business and International (LB&I) helps corporations and partnerships with assets greater than $10 million to comply with tax laws, including emerging international issues.
- Small Business/Self Employed (SB/SE) helps small business and self-employed taxpayers understand and meet their tax obligations.
- Tax Exempt & Government Entities (TE/GE) helps taxpayers with pension plans, exempt organizations, and government entities comply with tax laws.
- Taxpayer Services (TS) helps taxpayers understand and comply with tax laws.
Geographical Impact
Every state, including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, had probationary employees who received termination notices or accepted the DRP.
Iowa, Colorado, Mississippi, and Idaho had the highest percentage of employee separations compared to the IRS workforce in those states. By the numbers, Texas, California, New York, Georgia, and Pennsylvania had the most separations.
Demographics
Most (91%) of the 7,315 probationary employees who received termination notices had less than one year experience with the IRS. Of those remaining, 615 employees had between one and five years of service, while 31 had more than five years.
That doesn’t mean that those employees were unskilled. The IRS’s recent hiring efforts paid off: even though most probationary employees had not been with the IRS long, some were in highly skilled technical positions, like IT specialists and data scientists. According to TIGTA, 1,488 probationary employees were GS-13 (13% of all employees at that grade level). The GS-13 pay grade is generally reserved for top-level positions such as supervisors, high-level technical specialists, and top professionals holding advanced degrees.
Probationary employees who received termination notices tended to be under age 40. For example, 549 probationary employees were under 25 years old, which was 14% of all IRS employees in that age group.
The demographics for employees who accepted the DRP were quite different. For example, nearly four in ten employees who accepted the DRP had been at the IRS for 11 years or more. And, nearly half (47%) were more than 55 years of age.
Hiring Freeze
In addition to mandatory reductions, IRS employee levels will also be impacted by attrition, including those employees opting for retirement. Importantly, they will not be replaced. As part of his January 20 executive order, Trump issued a hiring freeze that was intended to be temporary, with one exception—the IRS. While the freeze was slated to expire for other federal government agencies after 90 days, the hiring freeze for the IRS will remain in place until “it is in the national interest to lift the freeze.”
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