alt Hacker NewsIRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
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I'm starting to realize that an LLM isn't gonna take my job, but it's beginning to make the job aggravating enough to quit anyhow. So many managers have decided they're going to have an AI Miracle and aren't interested in hearing otherwise, no matter what staff tells them.
The headline say 40% based off something a single person said at a conference while the same article says the federal inspector general is saying a 16% reducation, as well as this quote:
> According to a report by the US Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the IT department had 8,504 workers as of October 2024. As of October 2025, it had 7,135.
It always sets off my spidey sense when people say 'leadership' because too many conflate management with leadership, and that is unfortunately not always true.
Few managers are actually leaders. Many are trumped up scribes. And many leaders are not managers.
The thing that makes me nervous is the statement that they plan to use AI. AI? The thing that is mathematically incapable of perfection, on finance information, for which perfection is table stakes? Not to mention all the privacy issues (although that boat has sailed).
Consist strategy in hampering income:
> "Starve the beast" is a political strategy employed by American conservatives to limit government spending[1][2][3] by cutting taxes, to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending. The term "the beast", in this context, refers to the United States federal government and the programs it funds, primarily with American tax money, particularly social programs[1] such as education, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.[3]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
Of course the GOP isn't very good at cutting spending, so deficits (and debt) tend to go up under their administration.
They can always learn a new skill like programming.
AI audits for everybody. Of course they're going to do it.
Starve the beast in action. The less employees the IRS has, the lower the chance there are enough staff on hand to audit the truly uber rich properly.
Feels terrible to be an American rn, I'm preparing for major errors and delays in the processing of my tax return.
My good friend Sam Corcos is leading these efforts as the CIO of the Treasury Department. I know a good conspiracy theory about lowering taxes for the rich is much juicier, but if anyone is interested in learning more, he did an excellent interview on Chris Williamson’s podcast about how inefficient the IRS is:
If you're not asking, "how many of these people did nothing?" you've never worked in the public sector.
8,500 IT workers in the IRS is insane.
They barely have any products, and they contract externally for so much other work
Defunding the IRS is nothing but an effort to reduce tax enforcement. People that have relatively straightforward finances can be trivially audited in a formulaic way with data that's on hand - a lack of human auditing resources tends to benefit those with more complex finances which also tend to be the people with a lot of money who can afford to lobby for less enforcement funding.
Also for reference, in 2024 the IRS had a rate of return of 415:1, they'll obviously target the lowest hanging fruit first but for every dollar of funding received they collected 415 dollars of tax revenue that would have been missed. This is an obscenely efficient organization.