The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) fired dozens of Denver employees Thursday, beginning President Donald Trump’s broader purge of the agency’s workforce, according to Axios.
Between 120 and 150 Denver IRS workers, most of whom were probationary, were laid off across multiple divisions, including collections and tax compliance, Patricia Allen, a chapter president at the National Treasury Employees Union, told the outlet. The layoffs follow Trump’s directives to shrink the federal workforce through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has also been tasked with identifying and freezing wasteful federal spending.
“I’ve been with the IRS for 20 years, and I’ve never seen this kind of layoff. Never,” Allen told the outlet.
Some of the laid off workers reportedly received early morning terminations, while others awaited emails they expected would give them 30 minutes to vacate the premises. Over 6,000 IRS employees face termination in the agency’s initial round of cuts, The New York Times first reported.
Musk initially sought to examine the IRS and its spending programs by attempting to access the agency’s payment systems over the weekend, prompting a coalition of union groups to file a lawsuit against the Trump administration Monday.
The world’s richest man has characterized the U.S. executive bureaucracy as a cumbersome impediment to the will of the American citizens, arguing that a vast reduction in the unelected federal government would mean fewer middlemen standing between voters, their elected representatives and federal policy.
“If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy,” Musk said during a recent Oval Office press conference. He also stressed the importance of addressing the federal deficit, stating, “if we don’t do something about this deficit, the country’s going bankrupt.”
Democrats, however, contend the federal staffing cuts could “wreak havoc” on tax refunds and other taxpayer services just weeks before the April 15 filing deadline.
“It is nearly inevitable that this hiring freeze, compounded by layoffs and further reductions in staff mandated as a result of Elon Musk’s unprecedented power grab, will delay refunds and degrade taxpayer service … These reckless decisions on the part of Elon Musk and the Trump administration will likely cause serious financial hardship for people across the country,” Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner and several Democratic colleagues argued in a Tuesday press release.
The IRS faces an uncertain future under Trump. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Fox News’s Jesse Watters on Wednesday that the president’s “goal” was to abolish the agency and “let all the outsiders pay” instead.
“His goal is very simple: to abolish — his goal is to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay,” Lutnick said. “I mean, this is someone who is focused on America.”
Lutnick’s comments align with Trump’s recent rhetoric on the IRS. The president has repeatedly suggested replacing federal income tax with higher tariffs, arguing the “richest period in the history of the United States” occurred between 1870 and 1913, when federal revenue primarily came from tariffs.
“We had no income tax. The income tax came in 1913 … instead of taxing our citizens to enrich foreign nations, we should be tariffing and taxing foreign nations to enrich our citizens.” the president said in a January speech in Florida. “You know, the United States in 1870 to 1913 — all tariffs. And that was the richest period in the history of the United States, relatively speaking.”
Trump also proposed creating an “External Revenue Service” days before his inauguration to emphasize generating revenue through tariffs rather than income taxes.
The IRS has long been the subject of criticism and scrutiny for conservatives, particularly after the agency admitted wrongdoing for using “heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays” to impede tax-exempt applications from conservative groups in 2017. Americans view the tax collection entity less favorably than any other federal agency, a Pew Research poll found in July.
Conservatives also scorned the agency after former President Joe Biden approved the hiring of 87,000 new IRS employees over the course of ten years in 2022. Biden and congressional Democrats greenlit an additional $80 billion in agency funding that year to bolster the new employees’ enforcement efforts through the Inflation Reduction Act, a budget increase Republicans quickly moved to claw back.
The Treasury Department and the IRS did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Featured Image Credit: Carol M. Highsmith
