It’s Tax Day, again. Our columnist goes inside the short-staffed I.R.S. to investigate its employees’ struggles—and the precarious future of the agency. Plus:
Illustration by Chris W. Kim
E. Tammy Kim
Kim writes about politics, labor, and the federal government.
Every year, I find myself up against the Tax Day deadline, hunting down paper forms and password-protected PDFs, disciplining piles of crumpled receipts, and getting all the fine-print arithmetic just right. This stress, like money, is distributed unevenly. The wealthy and their corporations operate not on the basis of a tax season but rather on a year-round minimization of liability, achieved by accountants, financial planners, and lobbyists. Meanwhile, low- and middle-income taxpayers count on their refunds, through the earned-income tax credit, to survive the months to come.
The Treasury Department collected $5.1 trillion in taxpayer dollars during the 2024 fiscal year—money that everyone has a different take on how to spend (Medicare and Social Security, education, scientific research, tanks and bombs, asphalt on the interstate, job training). But all that depends on a functional Internal Revenue Service, which Donald Trump and Elon Musk have targeted since January. Until recently, the I.R.S. had about ninety thousand employees to carry out tax collection and enforcement across the United States and its territories. That number is considerably smaller now, and will continue to shrink as Trump and Musk make cut after cut—and change the nature of the agency’s work. Last week, in a possibly unlawful move, the Administration announced that the I.R.S. would share confidential taxpayer information with the Department of Homeland Security, for the express purpose of arresting and deporting undocumented immigrants.
My conversations with workers inside the I.R.S. reveal an agency struggling to carry out its basic mission under the dual pressures of tax season and DOGE. This Administration’s policies, enacted in the name of so-called efficiency, could cost the Treasury more than two trillion dollars in lost revenues throughout the next decade. Federal employees are not used to being the protagonists of any story, especially a story as dreary as this. The willingness of one I.R.S. customer-service representative to be featured in today’s installment of my Deep State Diaries column indicates just how desperate conditions have become.
Five years ago today, COVID-19 had infiltrated communities worldwide—and New York City was the pandemic’s epicenter. Americans waited for stimulus checks to arrive in their bank accounts and essential workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Queens had their temperature taken before clocking in. In a remarkable work of reporting, New Yorker contributors documented twenty-four hours of life in the city—and the people who were trying to keep it going. Revisit the story »
“Brace yourself—here come the C.P.A.s!”
P.S. Katy Perry, along with five other rich and famous women, took an eleven-minute journey to space yesterday on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket. While outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, Perry apparently serenaded the group with a zero-gravity rendition of “What a Wonderful World.” As Amanda Petrusich wrote in a review of the singer’s most recent album, “Subtlety, it seems, has never been Perry’s strong suit.” 🌎
Erin Neil contributed to this edition.
