Earlier this year, over 7,000 probationary IRS employees were terminated with all the warmth and human touch of a spreadsheet sort. There were no in-person performance evaluations, signed letters, or individualized reviews—just mass emails citing a mismatch between performance and mission needs.
A Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report dated Aug. 14 found that only about half of those employees had a performance rating on record, 90% of whom were deemed “Fully Successful” or better.
This is serious procedural mismanagement from a personnel standpoint. But it’s more of a success story from the perspective of the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative ostensibly driving these cuts.
Despite the courts forcing the IRS to reinstate those employees, more than half didn’t come back. Some took an offered buyout, while others simply walked. Why wouldn’t they? They had just been treated like disposable data points by an agency that didn’t even bother personalizing their pink slips.
Mass firing people, erasing procedural fairness under the guise of performance management, and doing it fast enough to outpace internal mechanisms for formal objections doesn’t just reduce personnel; it destroys institutional trust. The idea of returning to work might feel like volunteering for a second betrayal.
Yet, these events mean DOGE did what it set out to do. The IRS now has thousands fewer employees, and it didn’t have to trigger the political tripwires that surround a formal reduction in force.
It’s hard to imagine future “efficiency” efforts in this vein won’t take notes on the IRS’s experience: Let the spreadsheet sort determine who stays and who gets cut, let the courts undo it if they want, then let low morale do the rest. We may see all this play out again.
—Andrew Leahey
A sign for the Internal Revenue Service is seen outside its building in Washington.
Photographer: Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
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