Nobody is home at the IRS, leaving seven million American families waiting for their tax refunds

During one of the first meetings one of us attended as an executive at the U.S. Treasury Department, a week before the 2021 tax filing season, a senior Treasury civil servant laid out the stakes: In a normal year, tax refunds are make or break for the budgets of many American families – and in times of economic stress, they have outsized importance. Even small operational delays, he explained, would have huge real-world consequences. 

That year, taxpayers were rightfully furious about the service they got – the IRS received 282 million phone calls but only answered about 11% of them after an average hold time of 23 minutes. And too many families had their refunds delayed. A severely underfunded IRS was too understaffed to distribute more than 100 million stimulus checks while simultaneously processing more than a 100 million tax returns and a giant preexisting backlog. 

By the time we left government, during the 2025 tax season, the situation had improved dramatically thanks to significant investments by Congress and the Biden administration in the people and technology that make the IRS work. That year, the IRS served 87% of people who called with an average hold time of three minutes. Ninety percent of taxpayers got their refunds within three weeks, and many much faster.

That progress is a memory this year – the IRS is way behind in sending working families the money the federal government owes. According to the IRS, seven million families have already experienced delays in receiving their refunds than last year. And a new independent analysis found that it took taxpayers calling the IRS main line 28 minutes to get to a real person for help this filing season.The IRS has issued no comment or explanation about these widespread increased delays, leaving families to guess or compare notes on online message boards.
 
But one thing is for certain: these painful delays are a result of deliberate decisions by the Trump-Vance administration to gut the IRS and undermine the career civil servants that deliver for working families, making it harder for them to file their taxes this season.

The IRS is reeling from reckless political downsizing. In the last year, 20,000 employees were fired or pushed out of the agency and staffing now sits at the same level as the 1970s. While it’s routine that the IRS hires thousands of seasonal workers to help handle the rush of tax filing season, that did not happen this year. In fact, the IRS underhired seasonal workers – by the thousands. 

The team that processes paper tax returns, a critical process step for issuing many refunds, hired just 50 new employees, missing its hiring goal by 98%. Seasonal customer service agents who answer taxpayer questions by phone are understaffed by 1,200 employees and many have been hired so close to the filing season that they can only screen and route calls, rather than answer questions. 

This big miss was able to happen because the IRS also fired or pushed out 77% of its most senior executives in the last year. Especially at the beginning of a presidential term, when administration priorities are overwhelming and urgent to political leaders, a core function of senior career leadership is to ensure that cyclical but complex operations continue without interruption. 

Because of the gutting of the civil service and the disdain for those who are left, the Trump-Vance IRS leadership did not or could not hear the advice they needed to prevent this year’s tax season pain. 

It is a shame that the work of civil servants is most noticed in its absence. The delays we see now were not caused by inevitable inefficiency or incompetence. There is a direct line from Donald Trump’s campaign vow to shatter the so-called deep state, Elon Musk’s chainsaw, and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought’s promise to do trauma to civil servants to delayed refunds. 

In our time in federal service, we have learned that federal agencies are not marble buildings, fancy seals, or forms. They are not amalgamations of contracts, computer systems and organization charts. People run the government, and without those people, especially experienced public servants who have run filing season, the government can fail.

Through Democracy Forward’s Civil Service Strong and Democracy Works 250 initiatives, we are documenting the harms caused by attacks on agencies like the IRS, and advancing a vision to rebuild customer service capacity for taxpayers. The IRS is failing millions of taxpayers today. But failure is not inevitable – it’s a choice. And we must choose to do better.

By Julie Brinn Siegel, Civil Service Strong Fellow at Democracy Forward and former Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary Janet Yellen at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and John Pierce, Civil Service Strong Fellow and former Senior Advisor to the Chief Transformation Officer and the Commissioner at the IRS.