The IRS Is Imploding – Mother Jones

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In many years of paying taxes, I’ve never had a problem with the IRS. So, I was surprised to receive a letter dated May 25 informing us that my husband and I owe lots more money than we had paid for our 2025 taxes—and of course interest and fines. After reviewing the somewhat cryptic letter, we realized that we did not, in fact, owe any money. The IRS had simply failed to credit quarterly payments that we’d made on time. Because we had all the bank records, it seemed as if this would be a relatively straightforward problem to fix—until I picked up the phone and called the IRS.

Two hours on hold later, I gave up. When I tried again a few days later, the outgoing message informed me, “Due to the high call volume, we are unable to answer your call. Please call back later today or tomorrow.” And I was disconnected. After several more fruitless phone calls over the next week, I asked my accountant for advice. Unfortunately, she said, the dedicated lines for tax practitioners were going unanswered, too. She had never seen it so bad. She had clients who had serious issues to resolve, and there was “no contact available at all.”

At that point, I realized the IRS was finally imploding.

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.

“When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership,” former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told my colleague Michael Mechanic last year. “You really are disabling the IRS.”

“You can’t get rid of 30 percent of your staff and expect to be functional. Things are starting to break.”

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.

At an April congressional hearing, Bisignano assured lawmakers that IRS customer service had not suffered at all from the sudden, massive cuts in its workforce. He called 2026 “the most successful filing season in IRS history” and claimed that the Trump administration was proving it was possible to have both “less people and better results.”

My experience, that of many other taxpayers and tax professionals I have spoken with over the past month, as well as the IRS’s own data, suggest otherwise. “You can’t get rid of 30 percent of your staff and expect to be functional,” says Traci DiMartini, the former IRS human capital officer who was one of the first high-ranking officials DOGE pushed out last year. “Things are starting to break.”

Members of Congress have also started to notice. “The Administration laid off close to a third of the IRS workforce, sabotaging its mission, and making it impossible to get someone on the phone to answer even the simplest of questions, let alone resolve issues,” Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), ranking member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “Yet this Administration refuses to acknowledge the predictable consequences of gutting an agency and keeps telling taxpayers not to believe what they are experiencing.”

Contacting the IRS has never been easy. The agency has been badly underfunded for decades, as Republicans have made it the bête noir of the federal government and starved it for resources. Several of them, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), have called to abolish the IRS outright. "There are 93,000 agents at the IRS,” he said in June. “I think we should put a padlock on that building and put every one of them down on our southern border." (His numbers were actually outdated: Thanks to the DOGE cuts, as of January 2026, the IRS had fewer than 75,000 employees, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax 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...