Submission Statement: The real-time decline of the United States’ primary tax collection agency will have consequences for decades including an ever growing tax gap.
>Tax professionals, journalists—including those from Mother Jones—members of Congress and former IRS commissioners had warned this would happen. When Elon Musk’s DOGE service swept into the federal government like a buzzsaw in February last year, one of the first agencies it targeted for wholesale destruction was the IRS. DOGE slashed about a third of the entire IRS workforce in just a few short months. The agency hasn’t had a confirmed commissioner since August last year.
>In October, the administration created what members of Congress have dubbed the “fake job” of IRS CEO, which Congress never authorized. Trump filled the post with former finance executive Frank Bisignano, even though he is simultaneously in charge of the Social Security Administration.
>In 2022, under President Joe Biden, Democrats in Congress pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act, a kitchen-sink bit of legislation that included some $80 billion over 10 years to shore up and modernize the IRS. The new funding allowed the agency to hire and train thousands of new customer service employees.
>Republicans like Cruz, who have long believed that the IRS has unfairly targeted conservatives, immediately launched a conspiracy theory suggesting that Biden was going to use the money to hire a shadow army of 87,000 armed agents to harass innocent Americans. They eventually clawed back most of that funding, but the IRS nonetheless invested what remained in trying to make life better for ordinary taxpayers. In 2024, the service answered more than 1 million more calls from taxpayers during filing season than it had the previous year, and reduced the average hold time from 28 minutes to 3, according to IRS data.
>Since Trump took office, all of those metrics have reversed, particularly after the DOGE workforce cuts fully took effect in October. “It’s infinitely worse in 2026 than it was in 2025,” says Richard Champion, a New Jersey lawyer who has practiced tax law for nearly 50 years and represents low-income taxpayers in federal tax court pro bono. When he used to call the IRS practitioner line, he says he used to be able to get into the call-back queue so he didn’t have to sit on hold for hours. That option is increasingly unavailable. Now even when he does manage to reach someone, he says, they are often new and can’t help, so they forward him to someone else, and those calls inevitably get dropped. “I have at least four or five cases where I’m just stymied,” he says.
>These aren’t just anecdotal one-offs. A June report to Congress from the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent agency within the IRS, found that live humans answered 20 percent fewer calls during this year’s tax filing season and that hold times jumped anywhere from 81 to 161 percent, depending on the line called. Only 17 percent of the calls handled by the “voicebot” system were completed. Most callers got frustrated and either asked to be transferred to a live person or hung up.
>The worst service came on phone lines dedicated to people who owed money and needed help, such as an installment plan. Live operators answered only 30 percent of more than 3 million such calls this year between January and April 18. Those lucky taxpayers who got through waited an average of 45 minutes on hold.
>The nonprofit Center for Taxpayer Rights this year also conducted its own research on how bad the IRS call responsiveness has gotten. The group discovered that the government’s own measurements showed that wait times increased more than 70 percent in 2026, even though the agency received 50 percent fewer calls to its main 1040 help line than during the previous year. CTR testers then called various IRS phone numbers and found that nearly 40 percent of the calls were disconnected—mostly by the IRS.
>Tech problems have been a persistent problem at the chronically underfunded revenue service, which is why Biden’s IRA had allocated money for upgrades. Fixing IT problems, though, requires actual humans to do the work. Last year, the Trump administration pushed out more than 40 percent of the agency’s IT department. Most of the remaining employees were moved to Bisignano’s office or deployed to answer the phones during the greatest filing season of all time. Needless to say, the tech-forward team at DOGE did not improve the IRS technology.
>As the deadline for responding to my IRS letter rapidly approached and I continued to fail to reach anyone on the phone, I thought perhaps I could try to seek assistance in person at one of the IRS’s Taxpayer Assistance Centers. The Inflation Reduction Act had included funding to expand them, but the Trump administration has cut the number of fully staffed TACs to 42, from 102, according to a report by the Taxpayer Advocate. But the one where I live is still open, so I was hopeful—until I discovered that taxpayers can’t just walk in without an appointment. And the only way to make an appointment? Call the IRS.
>The US Post Office is the last resort for the ever-growing cadre of people who can’t get through the IRS phone lines. Of course, the Trump administration has also gutted the IRS mail room—with predictable results. According to a recent report by the Taxpayer Advocate, the number of unprocessed correspondence and amended returns languishing at the IRS jumped from 3.8 million in 2025 to 7 million this year. “And that was before all the people like you were sending in letters,” CTR’s Nina Olson told me.
>The Biden administration had been making some headway in reducing the mail backlog after it had reached epic proportions during the Covid pandemic. With funding from the IRA, the tax agency was able to staff up critical chokepoints in the system, including the mailroom. Charles Garn was one of the recruits hired in 2024 to work at the massive Ogden, Utah, IRS service center, where he was on the frontline opening the mail and sorting and processing 1040 forms and other correspondence from taxpayers.
>Almost as soon as he finished his training, DOGE pushed him out. He left in October, along with thousands of other IRS workers who’d taken the “deferred resignation” plan that paid them not to work for three months and then essentially fired them. But he was there long enough to see first-hand the impact of “crippling” staff losses.
textualcanon on
> “Republicans like Cruz, who have long believed that the IRS has unfairly targeted conservatives, immediately launched a conspiracy theory suggesting that Biden was going to use the money to hire a shadow army of 87,000 armed agents to harass innocent Americans.”
Forgot about him previewing the plan for ICE. This is why foreshadowing is so important in good literature!
TheCornjuring on
“Omg I need to contact the IRS and they’re taking forever to answer, the government is so bad at everything”
adamgerd on
DOGE messing up something once again. Is anyone shocked?
Worth_Temperature_42 on
Gutting the only directly profitable service of the gouvernment lol, you have to be a special kind of stupid, it would probably the only one that deserve to be bigger to get all the frauders even if it’s not profitable in term of money
They are going to use DOGE bullshit as an example to say that spending should increase by 20 trillions otherwise you are a DOGE advocate, aren’t they?
Degen_Typeracer on
Such a trumpism quote here,
> He called 2026 “the most successful filing season in IRS history”
I can just picture Trump saying this at a state of the union address. “Not only do we have greatest crowds, we also have had the most successful filing season in IRS history”
6 Comments
Submission Statement: The real-time decline of the United States’ primary tax collection agency will have consequences for decades including an ever growing tax gap.
>Tax professionals, journalists—including those from Mother Jones—members of Congress and former IRS commissioners had warned this would happen. When Elon Musk’s DOGE service swept into the federal government like a buzzsaw in February last year, one of the first agencies it targeted for wholesale destruction was the IRS. DOGE slashed about a third of the entire IRS workforce in just a few short months. The agency hasn’t had a confirmed commissioner since August last year.
>In October, the administration created what members of Congress have dubbed the “fake job” of IRS CEO, which Congress never authorized. Trump filled the post with former finance executive Frank Bisignano, even though he is simultaneously in charge of the Social Security Administration.
>In 2022, under President Joe Biden, Democrats in Congress pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act, a kitchen-sink bit of legislation that included some $80 billion over 10 years to shore up and modernize the IRS. The new funding allowed the agency to hire and train thousands of new customer service employees.
>Republicans like Cruz, who have long believed that the IRS has unfairly targeted conservatives, immediately launched a conspiracy theory suggesting that Biden was going to use the money to hire a shadow army of 87,000 armed agents to harass innocent Americans. They eventually clawed back most of that funding, but the IRS nonetheless invested what remained in trying to make life better for ordinary taxpayers. In 2024, the service answered more than 1 million more calls from taxpayers during filing season than it had the previous year, and reduced the average hold time from 28 minutes to 3, according to IRS data.
>Since Trump took office, all of those metrics have reversed, particularly after the DOGE workforce cuts fully took effect in October. “It’s infinitely worse in 2026 than it was in 2025,” says Richard Champion, a New Jersey lawyer who has practiced tax law for nearly 50 years and represents low-income taxpayers in federal tax court pro bono. When he used to call the IRS practitioner line, he says he used to be able to get into the call-back queue so he didn’t have to sit on hold for hours. That option is increasingly unavailable. Now even when he does manage to reach someone, he says, they are often new and can’t help, so they forward him to someone else, and those calls inevitably get dropped. “I have at least four or five cases where I’m just stymied,” he says.
>These aren’t just anecdotal one-offs. A June report to Congress from the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent agency within the IRS, found that live humans answered 20 percent fewer calls during this year’s tax filing season and that hold times jumped anywhere from 81 to 161 percent, depending on the line called. Only 17 percent of the calls handled by the “voicebot” system were completed. Most callers got frustrated and either asked to be transferred to a live person or hung up.
>The worst service came on phone lines dedicated to people who owed money and needed help, such as an installment plan. Live operators answered only 30 percent of more than 3 million such calls this year between January and April 18. Those lucky taxpayers who got through waited an average of 45 minutes on hold.
>The nonprofit Center for Taxpayer Rights this year also conducted its own research on how bad the IRS call responsiveness has gotten. The group discovered that the government’s own measurements showed that wait times increased more than 70 percent in 2026, even though the agency received 50 percent fewer calls to its main 1040 help line than during the previous year. CTR testers then called various IRS phone numbers and found that nearly 40 percent of the calls were disconnected—mostly by the IRS.
>Tech problems have been a persistent problem at the chronically underfunded revenue service, which is why Biden’s IRA had allocated money for upgrades. Fixing IT problems, though, requires actual humans to do the work. Last year, the Trump administration pushed out more than 40 percent of the agency’s IT department. Most of the remaining employees were moved to Bisignano’s office or deployed to answer the phones during the greatest filing season of all time. Needless to say, the tech-forward team at DOGE did not improve the IRS technology.
>As the deadline for responding to my IRS letter rapidly approached and I continued to fail to reach anyone on the phone, I thought perhaps I could try to seek assistance in person at one of the IRS’s Taxpayer Assistance Centers. The Inflation Reduction Act had included funding to expand them, but the Trump administration has cut the number of fully staffed TACs to 42, from 102, according to a report by the Taxpayer Advocate. But the one where I live is still open, so I was hopeful—until I discovered that taxpayers can’t just walk in without an appointment. And the only way to make an appointment? Call the IRS.
>The US Post Office is the last resort for the ever-growing cadre of people who can’t get through the IRS phone lines. Of course, the Trump administration has also gutted the IRS mail room—with predictable results. According to a recent report by the Taxpayer Advocate, the number of unprocessed correspondence and amended returns languishing at the IRS jumped from 3.8 million in 2025 to 7 million this year. “And that was before all the people like you were sending in letters,” CTR’s Nina Olson told me.
>The Biden administration had been making some headway in reducing the mail backlog after it had reached epic proportions during the Covid pandemic. With funding from the IRA, the tax agency was able to staff up critical chokepoints in the system, including the mailroom. Charles Garn was one of the recruits hired in 2024 to work at the massive Ogden, Utah, IRS service center, where he was on the frontline opening the mail and sorting and processing 1040 forms and other correspondence from taxpayers.
>Almost as soon as he finished his training, DOGE pushed him out. He left in October, along with thousands of other IRS workers who’d taken the “deferred resignation” plan that paid them not to work for three months and then essentially fired them. But he was there long enough to see first-hand the impact of “crippling” staff losses.
> “Republicans like Cruz, who have long believed that the IRS has unfairly targeted conservatives, immediately launched a conspiracy theory suggesting that Biden was going to use the money to hire a shadow army of 87,000 armed agents to harass innocent Americans.”
Forgot about him previewing the plan for ICE. This is why foreshadowing is so important in good literature!
“Omg I need to contact the IRS and they’re taking forever to answer, the government is so bad at everything”
DOGE messing up something once again. Is anyone shocked?
Gutting the only directly profitable service of the gouvernment lol, you have to be a special kind of stupid, it would probably the only one that deserve to be bigger to get all the frauders even if it’s not profitable in term of money
They are going to use DOGE bullshit as an example to say that spending should increase by 20 trillions otherwise you are a DOGE advocate, aren’t they?
Such a trumpism quote here,
> He called 2026 “the most successful filing season in IRS history”
I can just picture Trump saying this at a state of the union address. “Not only do we have greatest crowds, we also have had the most successful filing season in IRS history”