Trump to Cut IRS Workforce by 20%

The Trump administration on Thursday removed the Internal Revenue Service’s top lawyer and rolled out plans to downsize nearly 20 percent of the agency’s staff as billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service seeks access to sensitive taxpayer records, according to five people familiar with the matter.

William Paul, a career official named to the position in January, will be replaced by Andrew De Mello, who was nominated to be the Education Department’s inspector general during Trump’s first term, three of the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media.

Also, DOGE officials instructed the acting IRS commissioner to eliminate 18,141 jobs across the agency by May 15, according to records obtained by The Washington Post.

The tax compliance department would have the largest job cuts (8,260) followed by taxpayer services (3,247) and information technology, the records show. Those moves are only an initial phase of job cuts.

Gavin Kliger, a DOGE software engineer embedded at the IRS, has signaled to agency leadership plans for further headcount reductions, according to two of the people.

The internal reshuffling comes as career staff clash with DOGE officials over attempts to access taxpayer information widely viewed as some of the most closely guarded records in the federal government. The Trump Department of Homeland Security has pushed IRS officials for the addresses of about 700,000 undocumented immigrants — a request viewed by career staff as violating the law. DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, has also pressed for tax agency systems, property and datasets.

Separately, the Trump administration is also moving forward with cuts to tens of thousands of jobs at the tax agency.

All five of the people familiar with the matter said Paul’s ouster has provoked concern among career staff already alarmed by an apparent purge across the IRS. Doug O’Donnell, a civil servant who spent several decades at the agency, left the IRS last month amid the disagreement between career staff and political appointees. David A. Lebryk, who oversaw the Treasury Department’s payment systems, left the government in January after not complying with a DOGE request to unilaterally cease payments on foreign aid.

DOGE has sought to use IRS records as part of its push to reduce fraud in federal benefits spending. The Washington Post previously reported that DOGE wants to check federal benefits spending against tax records, which could help Musk’s team identify duplicative or erroneous payments.

But these and similar efforts have provoked a significant backlash from career staffers, who point to long-standing legal protections governing the use of sensitive federal data. Civil servants across the government, including at the Social Security Administration and Department of Health and Human Services, have objected in recent days to DOGE’s attempts to penetrate these closely guarded systems.

The Trump administration is also moving ahead with plans to significantly reduce the number of IRS personnel. Some officials have said they are expecting as many as 25,000 additional IRS employees to be laid off, on top of the roughly 12,000 who have already left the tax agency. Tax experts have said these reductions could hurt the ability of the IRS to raise the revenue necessary to fund the U.S. government.

It’s highly unusual to remove an acting chief counsel, former IRS officials say. While the chief counsel is a political appointee who often leaves at the end of an administration, acting chief counsels like Paul are typically experienced career officials tapped to step up until a permanent replacement is confirmed, said John Koskinen, a former IRS commissioner who served from 2013 to 2017.

He could not recall another time when a member of the chief counsel’s office was removed and called it a “troubling sign.”