More than 6,000 employees of the US Internal Revenue Service will be laid off, which will lead to the elimination of about 6% of its workforce at the height of the busy tax filing season, Reuters reported, BTA reported.
The cuts are part of President Donald Trump's massive effort to reduce staff, which is targeting bank regulators, forestry workers, scientists in the country's rocket programs and tens of thousands of other government employees. The effort to reduce the number of workers in the public sector is led by billionaire Elon Musk, who is the largest donor to Trump's campaign, Reuters recalls.
Unions have already filed lawsuits in an attempt to stop the mass layoffs, but a federal judge in Washington has ruled that they can continue for now. Tens of thousands of federal employees have already been told they will lose their jobs.
The Internal Revenue Service is expected to lay off 6,700 people, most of them employees hired when it expanded during the term of former President Joe Biden. The agency currently employs about 100,000 people, up from 80,000 before Biden took office in 2021.
The agency is taking a more cautious approach to layoffs than other government agencies, given that it is currently in the midst of the tax filing season. With more than 140 million individual returns expected to be processed by the April 15 tax filing deadline, the agency will keep several thousand employees considered essential to the task, Reuters noted.