The IRS Is Imploding
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 owelots 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 thatwe’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 army of 87,000 armed agents to harass innocent Americans. They eventually clawed back most of that funding, but the IRS nonetheless invested what remained in trying to make life better for ordinary taxpayers. In 2024, the service answered more than 1 million more calls from taxpayers during filing season than it had the previous year, and reduced the average hold time from 28 minutes to 3, according to IRS data.
Since Trump took office, all of those metrics have reversed, particularly after the DOGE workforce cuts fully took effect in October. “It’s infinitely worse in 2026 than it was in 2025,” says Richard Champion, a New Jersey lawyer who has practiced tax law for nearly 50 years and represents low-income taxpayers in federal tax court pro bono. When he used to call the IRS practitioner line, he says he used to be able to get into the call-back queue so he didn’t have to sit on hold for hours. That option is increasingly unavailable. Now even when he does manage to reach someone, he says, they are often new and can’t help, so they forward him to someone else, and those calls inevitably get dropped. “I have at least four or five cases where I’m just stymied,” he says.
“There are some days I will literally be on the phone with the IRS five or six hours. And that’s because my call dropped, so I’m calling back again. It’s horrible. It’s the worst that I’ve seen.”
Sakinah Tillman runs the tax clinic at the University of the District of Columbia’s David Clark School of Law. She has worked with low-income taxpayers for more than a decade and says a few years ago, she’d get someone on the phone in 15 minutes. Now, however, “There are some days I will literally be on the phone with the IRS five or six hours,” she told me. “And that’s because my call dropped, so I’m calling back again. It’s horrible. It’s the worst that I’ve seen.” Even more troubling, she told me, is that the managers have all but disappeared. “Every time I’ve been making a request for a manager in the last year,” she said, “I’m not getting a call back.”
These aren’t just anecdotal one-offs. A June report to Congress from the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent agency within the IRS, found that live humans answered 20 percent fewer calls during this year’s tax filing season and that hold times jumped anywhere from 81 to 161 percent, depending on the line called. Only 17 percent of the calls handled by the “voicebot” system were completed. Most callers got frustrated and either asked to be transferred to a live person or hung up.
The worst service came on phone lines dedicated to people who owed money and needed help, such as an installment plan. Live operators answered only 30 percent of more than 3 million such calls this year between January and April 18. Those lucky taxpayers who got through waited an average of 45 minutes on hold.
The nonprofit Center for Taxpayer Rights this year also conducted its own research on how bad the IRS call responsiveness has gotten. The group discovered that the government’s own measurements showed that wait times increased more than 70 percent in 2026, even though the agency received 50 percent fewer calls to its main 1040 help line than during the previous year. CTR testers then called various IRS phone numbers and found that nearly 40 percent of the calls were disconnected—mostly by the IRS.
Nina Olson, the executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, ran the Taxpayer Advocate Service inside the IRS for nearly 20 years. She spent a day on hold herself during filing season as part of the study. Since then, she says, the service has likely gotten even worse because the IRS had shuffled staff to cover the phones during that busy time. “Where I deal is the morning after,” she said. “The morning after April 16.” Which is exactly when people like me start getting threatening notices from the IRS and can’t get anyone to pick up the phone. “There’s no one there,” Olson said.
During my many hours on hold with the IRS, the outgoing phone messages encouraged me to try to resolve my issues online. But when I logged into my IRS account, I discovered this message: “Account features limited due to partial outage. While you can still access your account, some features are unavailable, including account balance and payment history. If you don’t see what you need, please come back later.” After more than a month of coming back later, I still couldn’t access my payment history.
Tech problems have been a persistent problem at the chronically underfunded revenue service, which is why Biden’s IRA had allocated money for upgrades. Fixing IT problems, though, requires actual humans to do the work. Last year, the Trump administration pushed out more than 40 percent of the agency’s IT department. Most of the remaining employees were moved to Bisignano’s office or deployed to answer the phones during the greatest filing season of all time. Needless to say, the tech-forward team at DOGE did not improve the IRS technology.
Stephanie Liuzzi, a seismic engineer in California, got a letter from the IRS this year saying her tax payment had been rejected because of a problem with the bank account number on her return. The letter instructed her how to pay online, which she did. But in May, she got another letter saying that not only does she still owe money, but she now also owes penalties. After hours on hold with the IRS, she finally reached someone who confirmed that she had in fact paid her bill. But that person couldn’t waive the penalties and transferred Liuzzi to another line for help, where no one ever picked up. “I think everyone just went home,” she told me.
“It is currently refusing to let me reset my password. It keeps trying to send a text to a cell phone I had years ago. I have emailed in scans of my ID, my passport, but without access to that phone, it won’t let me in.”
After many more fruitless calls, she finally paid an $8 penalty online, but she hasn’t been able to confirm that her case is resolved because she can’t access her online account. “It is currently refusing to let me reset my password,” she told me. “It keeps trying to send a text to a cell phone I had years ago. I have emailed in scans of my ID, my passport, but without access to that phone, it won’t let me in.”
As the deadline for responding to my IRS letter rapidly approached and I continued to fail to reach anyone on the phone, I thought perhaps I could try to seek assistance in person at one of the IRS’s Taxpayer Assistance Centers. The Inflation Reduction Act had included funding to expand them, but the Trump administration has cut the number of fully staffed TACs to 42, from 102, according to a report by the Taxpayer Advocate. But the one where I live is still open, so I was hopeful—until I discovered that taxpayers can’t just walk in without an appointment. And the only way to make an appointment? Call the IRS.
I never got an appointment.
DiMartini, the former IRS human resources chief, has a vivid memory of her first time volunteering to help people with their taxes at a walk-in clinic in Philadelphia in 2024. “It was so humbling,” she recalled. DiMartini encountered lines of people around the block who had been victims of identity theft or unscrupulous tax preparers and women whose ex-husbands had illegally claimed their kids on his taxes. “What are these people going to do now?” she wonders. “As much as the tech bros want to automate everything, you still have to meet people where they’re at. People just want to pay their goddam bills. Why are we making it so hard?”
The IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service can help people cut through the bureaucracy, but Trump has decimated that office, too. Barbara Heggie, the managing attorney of Empire Justice Center’s Tax Advocacy Program in Rochester, NY, told me that now, when she really gets stonewalled by the IRS, she goes straight to Congress. “Every congressional office has staff who work on constituent services dealing with federal agency problems,” she said, “including IRS problems.”
“As much as the tech bros want to automate everything, you still have to meet people where they’re at. People just want to pay their goddam bills. Why are we making it so hard?”
Sadly, I am a disenfranchised resident of the District of Columbia, where we are taxed without representation. The closest thing we have to a member of Congress is Eleanor Holmes Norton, an 89-year-old nonvoting delegate with the same power as someone from Guam. Last year, I wrote about her mental deterioration and figured no one in her office would lift a finger to help resolve my tax issues, even if they did such things.
All of these roadblocks left me with one final option: snail mail.
The US Post Office is the last resort for the ever-growing cadre of people who can’t get through the IRS phone lines. Of course, the Trump administration has also gutted the IRS mail room—with predictable results. According to a recent report by the Taxpayer Advocate, the number of unprocessed correspondence and amended returns languishing at the IRS jumped from 3.8 million in 2025 to 7 million this year. “And that was before all the people like you were sending in letters,” CTR’s Nina Olson told me.
The Biden administration had been making some headway in reducing the mail backlog after it had reached epic proportions during the Covid pandemic. With funding from the IRA, the tax agency was able to staff up critical chokepoints in the system, including the mailroom. Charles Garn was one of the recruits hired in 2024 to work at the massive Ogden, Utah, IRS service center, where he was on the frontline opening the mail and sorting and processing 1040 forms and other correspondence from taxpayers.
Almost as soon as he finished his training, DOGE pushed him out. He left in October, along with thousands of other IRS workers who’d taken the “deferred resignation” plan that paid them not to work for three months and then essentially fired them. But he was there long enough to see first-hand the impact of “crippling” staff losses.
When Garn first started, his division would get a massive delivery of papers first thing in the morning. “We’d wipe it all out by the end of the day,” he explained. By the time the staffing cuts had fully kicked in, “We weren’t clearing out the deliveries. People were working harder and pumping out more, but we still weren’t able to meet what we needed to.”
The IRS might not be opening a lot of the mail it receives, but somehow it’s still sending it out. Even before the deadline to respond to my first letter had passed, the IRS sent me a new one reminding me that I have a past-due balance. “If you don’t act now, the IRS may consider levying (seizing) your income or bank account,” my newest missive warned.
The letter was a stark reminder that the collapse of the IRS customer service functions isn’t just an occasional annoyance for taxpayers. It can literally ruin people’s lives. If a taxpayer fails to respond to letters like the ones I got, and to pay an outstanding balance, even if it’s wrong, the IRS can eventually garnish their wages, seize bank accounts, or even take their cars or houses to settle the bill.
These consequences land heavily on those who can least afford it: the elderly, people whose first language is not English, and of course, poor people of all sorts. “Clients don’t have scanners,” says Tillman, who says a lot of correspondence with the IRS now requires such things. “Some don’t have laptops, or if they do, they don’t know how to use them.”
Low-income people are also particularly vulnerable to fraud. “Tax season is one of the most vulnerable times for low-income taxpayers because you have crooked preparers that prey on them,” Tillman says. She usually sees these clients after they get a letter from the IRS ordering them to repay thousands of dollars of the refund they weren’t entitled to.
The Trump administration’s destruction of the IRS has other less obvious harms—even beyond the nearly $900 billion in revenue it won’t be able to collect over the next decade thanks to the staffing cuts. “A lot of the anti-poverty structure of the safety net is embedded in the tax code,” explains Omeed Firouzi, director of the low-income tax clinic at Temple University law school.
The Earned Income Tax Credit, child tax credit, plus the new provisions in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that exempted tips, overtime and some Social Security payments from taxes—all of that requires people to accurately file a tax return. At the same time, the Big Beautiful Bill also made massive cuts to anti-poverty programs like SNAP and Medicaid, making the credits provided through the tax code even more important.
The Trump administration seems to have grudgingly recognized that the IRS needs more people, if only to collect taxes to pay for its ruinous war in Iran. In February, the Treasury Department gave the IRS permission to hire 8,000 people through September. “These hiring events are an important step in strengthening our workforce and improving the taxpayer experience,” Bisignano said in a June press release announcing a series of hiring fairs across the country.
“Kudos for that, but no one is showing up [to the fairs] because they don’t trust the federal government,” says DiMartini. “It is going to take decades to recover.”
In the meantime, I worked on this story one day to the backdrop of IRS hold music. After an hour and a half of waiting, I stayed on the phone while I went to Sweetgreen and got lunch, ate my salad while I watched Todd Blanche testify before Congress, and then at the two-hour mark … got disconnected.
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