The 2026 tax filing season was “largely successful” despite deep cuts to the Internal Revenue Service made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency last year, according to the agency’s independent watchdog arm.
The results, compiled in a Thursday report by Erin Collins, the national taxpayer advocate, come as a surprise after nearly a third of the IRS workforce was lost amid President Donald Trump’s efforts to shake up the federal workforce. The report mostly celebrates the nearly 139 million individual tax returns and the more than 90 million refunds processed this season, but found that millions of filers who needed additional assistance often struggled to receive support.
Collins acknowledged the “considerable uncertainty about the IRS’s ability to successfully manage” 2026 filing season, but issued a mostly positive report of the revenue service’s operations.
“In the end, the IRS performed better than expected in most respects,” Collins said. “The vast majority of taxpayers filed their returns successfully and received their refunds without significant delay.”
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Though this year’s season was broadly successful, Collins — whose independent organization serves as the official voice for taxpayers — said filers “who required assistance from the IRS often struggled to get it.”
Millions of taxpayers depending on the returns waited weeks or months for their frozen funds to go through, and filers calling the IRS “often could not reach a live employee despite repeated attempts,” according to Collins’ report. Some filers also faced weeks-long delays for their refunds due to the IRS’s attempt to wean the government off paper checks, the IRS announced earlier this year.
Musk, the billionaire and on-again-off-again Trump ally, aggressively targeted the IRS while running DOGE, permanently reshaping the agency through layoffs and buyout packages.
The IRS cut more than 28,000 employees last year, but an internal memorandum obtained by NOTUS revealed the agency ultimately requested, and received, special authority earlier this year to hire 8,000 employees on an expedited basis. The hiring campaign is still ongoing.
The IRS reassigned information technology and human resources staff with no relevant tax experience to process tax returns this year, NOTUS reported in June.
The Trump administration publicly downplayed potential staffing shortages for this year’s tax season.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in a testimony to Congress in June, called any concerns over the cuts to the IRS “a complete fallacy.” Frank Bisignano, CEO of the IRS, told Congress in March that he felt “good” about the 75,000 employees the agency currently had.
“I’ve yet to find one piece of paper that explained why that was the right number,” Bisignano said regarding the 100,000 employees the IRS had under President Joe Biden.
The Trump administration said it was using DOGE to root out alleged “waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal government, as well as reducing overall spending. Musk said last year that he hoped to reduce the federal budget by $2 trillion, but he later reduced that benchmark to $150 billion.
According to an analysis conducted by the libertarian Cato Institute, DOGE’s cuts represented the largest peacetime workforce reduction in American history — but had little effect on overall spending. The federal deficit is projected to grow by $200 million this fiscal year, Cato found.
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