Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called any concerns over the cuts to IRS staffing “a complete fallacy” in a testimony to Congress earlier this month.
Frank Bisignano, the IRS CEO, told lawmakers that the “pundits out there saying IRS is going to fail” as a result of sweeping staffing cuts are wrong.
“I feel good about the number of employees I have right now,” Bisignano said in March.
Internally, however, the agency is projecting an entirely different picture. While the Trump administration publicly stated that the IRS has suffered no ill effects from the staffing cuts, the agency was sounding the alarm that it would be unable to handle tax season, requesting special permission to hire thousands of employees on an expedited basis.
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The IRS ultimately requested, and received, special authority to hire 8,000 employees on an expedited basis, according to an internal memorandum obtained by NOTUS.
The agency has “seen massive cuts to its staff in 2025 through workforce reduction initiatives” and “ongoing staffing shortages put the 2026 Filing Season at risk,” Alex Kweskin, the agency’s top human-resources official, said in the late-February memo to the Treasury Department that was later passed on to the Office of Personnel Management.
“Processing of tax returns, return information, balance due, delinquent returns, and correspondence for taxpayers and practitioners remains an on-going issue,” he said in the memo, noting that the agency is still dealing with backlogs.
The Trump administration allowed the IRS to use a hiring authority that’s available to federal agencies when a “critical hiring need or severe shortage of candidates exists.”
An Office of Personnel Management official confirmed that it has granted the accelerated hiring authority to the IRS, which declined to comment. The IRS will have the approval through September, though Kweskin said in the memo the need would remain through that time “at a minimum.” The authority empowers agencies to bypass the normal steps that typically bog down federal hiring, such as consideration of veterans’ preferences or a full rating and review of top candidates.
The hiring push comes after the tax agency pushed out 28,000 employees last year, or around 27% of its workforce. The cuts were among the most significant of any agency during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Danny Werfel, who led the IRS under then-President Joe Biden, said the agency was now acknowledging the warnings that watchdogs had issued when the cuts first went into effect.
“The effects of IRS staffing reductions are often invisible to taxpayers — until they need help,” Werfel said. “If a return is flagged, a refund is delayed, correspondence goes unanswered, or a case requires human review, having enough trained employees becomes critical to resolving the issue in a timely manner.”
He added that while growing backlogs may seem abstract to Americans, “for taxpayers it means longer waits, greater uncertainty and delayed resolution of stressful tax matters.”
The IRS is primarily hiring clerks, tax examiners, accounting technicians, tax specialists and contact representatives. Their division, Taxpayer Services, by far the largest in the IRS, shed 9,000 employees last year, or 21% of its workforce.
The IRS surged staffing to customer service — and throughout the agency — under the Biden administration using Inflation Reduction Act funds, though Congress has revoked much of that money and the agency has unwound all the hiring gains achieved under the previous administration.
Bessent called the hiring surges under Biden “a complete disaster.”
One former senior IRS official who recently left the agency said it was foreseeable that the agency would look to unwind some of its cuts, though he noted the hiring effort would not focus on enforcement personnel.
“I don’t understand how the system can operate,” the former official said. “I’m not surprised that they do not have adequate people to do this.”
The IRS could encounter difficulty in reaching its hiring target given the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to the federal workforce, the former senior official said, adding that in previous staffing efforts he helped spearhead the agency lost out to companies like Amazon for the entry-level, frontline jobs for which it is now hiring.
“I don’t know how that plays out when there’s so much uncertainty and so many people were let go across the IRS and across the federal government,” the former official said.
Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents most IRS employees, said her organization tried to warn the agency about the impacts of its cuts and hopes it will now push for more resources from Congress.
“We are glad the IRS now seems to realize it needs an adequate workforce to fulfill its critical mission on behalf of the American people,” Greenwald said. “Unfortunately, the IRS forced thousands of professional, experienced employees out the door and must now go through the time and expense of hiring and training thousands of new employees.”
The agency has taken some steps to mitigate the impacts of its cuts, including by assigning employees with no relevant experience to process tax returns and boosting the use of mandatory overtime.
But the load on the IRS has only grown since the Trump administration gutted its staff. In addition to staffing cuts and ongoing attrition, Kweskin’s memo also cited the “significant changes in tax law” brought on by last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That measure has required the diminished IRS workforce to implement more than 100 changes to the tax code, he said.
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