What Happened
Reuters reported on April 15 that Internal Revenue Service enforcement revenue fell by about 5% in fiscal 2025, nearly $5 billion, after major staffing cuts under the Trump administration. According to the report, the IRS also opened more than 120,000 fewer tax audits than the year before.
The Department of Government Efficiency oversaw sweeping cuts across the agency, and Reuters reported that the IRS enforcement arm lost roughly 5,000 employees headed into 2026, with another 5,000 cuts projected. That means the government effectively chose to reduce the number of people whose job is to go find unpaid taxes and then acted surprised when less unpaid tax money got found.
Why This Matters
This is not subtle. If you hollow out tax enforcement, rich people with aggressive accountants and corporations with expensive lawyers do not suddenly become morally inspired. They get more room. The whole point of funding enforcement is that sophisticated tax avoidance and outright cheating are expensive to police. That is why cutting the cops from the tax beat and calling it efficiency is such obvious nonsense.
Reuters also noted that when the IRS is under-resourced, it tends to shift toward auditing lower-income taxpayers because those cases are cheaper to process. So the glamorous anti-bureaucracy stunt can end up producing exactly the dumbest possible version of government: weaker scrutiny of complex high-dollar abuse and more pressure on people with less power to fight back.
The Bigger Joke
Washington loves to talk about waste, fraud, and deficits. Then someone cuts the workers whose literal job is to recover money owed to the government and everyone is expected to admire the seriousness of the cost-saving effort. It is austerity cosplay with a calculator set to vibes.
If you wanted a clean symbol of official dumbassery, this is strong material: fewer auditors, fewer audits, less enforcement revenue, and still the same sales pitch that all this somehow counts as smart management. Incredible stuff.
Sources
Reuters: Tax enforcement weakened after Trump job cuts, IRS data shows