The IRS is in turmoil. Taxpayers are taking notice.
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
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Summary
With just a few weeks to go until Tax Day, Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue.
The prediction, officials told congressional economic correspondent Jacob Bogage, is directly tied to changing taxpayer behavior and President Donald Trump’s rapid demolition of parts of the IRS.
On “Post Reports,” Jacob joins host Colby Itkowitz to discuss the signals the Trump administration has sent taxpayers with its shrinking of the IRS. And he explains how the administration is hoping to use the tax agency's confidential taxpayer databases to aid in its mass deportation campaign.
Today’s show was produced by Rennie Svirnovskiy, with help from Bishop Sand. It was edited by Peter Bresnan and mixed by Sean Carter.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We are just a few weeks out from April 15th, tax day, and many officials at the IRS are feeling nervous. |
| 0:11.1 | The forecast right now is a 10% decrease in tax revenue for this filing season. |
| 0:17.9 | Jacob Bogage is a congressional economics correspondent for the post. |
| 0:21.8 | The IRS collects about $5 trillion in taxes every year. If we're looking at a 10% drop, |
| 0:28.8 | that's $500 billion. And to put that in perspective, the Defense Department spent about |
| 0:35.0 | $825 billion last year. That's a huge amount of money that will have |
| 0:40.4 | impacts across the federal government immediately. Jacob says that tax officials are predicting a |
| 0:47.9 | massive drop in tax revenue this year, and the reasons have a lot to do with President Donald |
| 0:52.4 | Trump and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge. |
| 0:57.0 | Over the last few months, Doge has taken steps to severely reduce the size and scope of the IRS. |
| 1:02.0 | They've laid off thousands of staff, halted efforts to modernize the tax system, |
| 1:07.0 | and have fired or forced out officials who've stood in their way. |
| 1:10.0 | A commissioner of internal revenue, the acting commissioner of the IRS, |
| 1:15.5 | the chief human capital officer, the chief procurement officer, |
| 1:18.8 | the acting chief procurement officer, the chief counsel, |
| 1:22.2 | the chief transformation and strategy officer, |
| 1:24.4 | and the chief of tax compliance. |
| 1:26.6 | All of these people have either been actively |
| 1:29.9 | fired by the Trump administration or said, I can't work like this anymore. And the guardrails |
| 1:36.3 | that are holding up our voluntary tax system are starting to wither a little bit. And taxpayers |
| 1:42.2 | and major corporations are noticing, and they're starting to change |
| 1:46.9 | their behavior to do more to pay less. |
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