Trump Slashed the IRS Workforce. What Will it Mean for Tax Season?
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Last week, President Trump fired 6,700 IRS employees right in the middle of tax season. In a New York Times guest essay, seven former IRS commissioners who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations decried the cuts, which constitute 7% of the agency's workforce, as bad policy that would make the agency less efficient and effective.

We've got one of those commissioners this morning to talk about those cuts, what the agency actually does and its future in this uncertain moment in the federal government. That's coming up next right after this news. Alexis Madrigal here. We've got a fundraising drive going. So you get a little bonus on the pledge free stream, the podcast or on our replay at night. I'm writing these mini essays and we're calling the series One Good Thing.

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In the city, Rainbow Grocery is a co-op with a kind of bulk products that make me give thanks for all the hippies who came before us. There's, of course, the KQED staple two, Gus's. The South Bay has Zanato's and the glories of the Vietnamese supermarkets in San Jose.

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Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. For a lot of decades, one tributary of the American population has complained about taxes, and they have done it loudly and a lot.

But social scientists, as we'll hear this morning, actually have a different read on the American people as a whole. We don't hate paying taxes. And what makes most Americans angry is actually that they perceive that the very rich and corporations don't pay their fair share. Now, the Trump administration's chainsaw chaos has hit the Internal Revenue Service, resulting in the layoff of 6,700 employees today.

We're going to step back on the IRS and taxes to talk about how this system works and what could happen to it in this new future we're living in. We're joined this morning by Daniel Werfel, former IRS commissioner. He served as the 50th IRS commissioner from March 2023 to January 2025, resigning before the end of his five-year term. Welcome, Danny. Thanks for having me on.

We're also joined by Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center. She's the author of Read My Lips, Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes. Welcome, Vanessa. Glad to be here. Yeah.

Daniel Werfel, let's start with you. You and these other IRS commissioners who worked for Republican and Democratic administrations published this piece in The New York Times last week in which you said, you know, decrying the cuts to the IRS. Ended up about a 7% cut to the workforce. Do you have any sense of sort of what that 7% is? Like which positions are being cut or maybe particular geographic areas?

Yeah, the way to think about the IRS is just to simplify it. You've got your services side, and those are the people that are

Answering the phones or in our walk-in centers, helping people with tax issues. There's also the side of, that's also the side of the IRS that is doing a lot of the processing of the incoming returns and the correspondence. And then there's essentially the collection side. Those that help make sure that the balance due that is assessed is actually paid. Yeah.

My understanding is the layoffs hit the collection side a lot harder than it hit the services side. But it may only be the first cut we see. We're waiting. And one of the reasons why myself and the former commissioners wanted to speak out was because if these cuts are in the name of

of cost efficiency or improving the government's financial bottom line, then we have a question for all the CEOs across the country. Would you take an ax to the accounts receivable of your organizations, which is essentially what the IRS is for the government? Would you take an ax to the accounts receivable as a way of improving your organization's bottom line? We think the answer is no, and we wanted to pose that question as widely and broadly as we could.

Yeah. I mean, have you seen, how would you compare this to any previous cuts in kind of IRS workforce? I mean, it is absolutely unprecedented and that's true across the government.

As I was leaving the position, I had an opportunity to meet with the Trump transition folks before January 20th. And my understanding is their vision for the future of the IRS is one that's far more automated, far more robotic, if you will, and therefore relies far less on people.

And that's their prerogative to have that vision. It's a reasonable one. I think every former commissioner, including myself, is in favor of modernization. The question becomes, when do you start shedding staff, if you will? And if you do it too early, before you're ready to automate...

then you're ultimately hurting both the taxpayers who won't be able to get through on the phones, won't be able to get their refunds timely, and you're also hurting the government's bottom line. Because it means that not that you are lowering taxes, you are not. Taxes are set by Congress. All you are doing with these cuts is making it harder for

for the IRS to collect the taxes that are already owed. And that will obviously be detrimental to the government's bottom line. I mean, the obvious question to ask is who benefits from those types of people being cut? You know, I struggle with that question. I know as the former commissioner, I actually have held the role twice, that paying taxes is not popular. But it is essential.

It is, you know, etched in stone at the IRS headquarters here in Washington is a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes that says, taxes are what we pay for a civilized society. So everything that the government provides, you know, whether it's food safety or air safety or protecting the homeland or arming our military that are in theaters of war, all of that

is essentially funded through IRS collections. And so that doesn't mean that it is not politically expedient to point to the IRS and say, this is the big bad IRS coming to take money from you. The reality is that while the IRS is not perfect and has made mistakes, as all people and organizations do,

Its fundamental mission is to help taxpayers meet their obligations to pay taxes. And we have a very complicated tax system. And their fundamental mission is to make sure they collect what is owed and not a penny more.

Well, that's what I wanted to, I'm kind of driving at this differential because if you're just a W-2 employee, you know, you work a job, the taxes are taken out kind of off the top, right? And then, you know, maybe you get a refund, maybe you don't. But like you're having fewer people who are on the collection side probably doesn't affect your life too much. But if you're someone with a lot more money who has much more complicated taxes, that's kind of who would be affected by that, right? Yeah.

Yes. I mean, you're absolutely right. And part of the reason why when I was commissioner, I fought for more resources on the enforcement or collections or compliance side of the House was not because I believed that wealthy people or large corporations are more likely to be tax cheats.

It was because the IRS needs those investments to build smarter capacity, whether it's through subject matter expertise or data science.

to figure out where the incidence of evasion is occurring or tax evasion is occurring amongst these more complicated filers. Think about a multinational corporation doing business in multiple tax jurisdictions that have subsidiaries on subsidiaries that are just operating in an extraordinarily complex space

and determining the balance due for that taxpayer, these tax filings that they come in are sometimes tens of thousands of pages long or hundreds of thousands of pages.

We need to have the capacity to assess that balance due with the same level of effectiveness as we do for that person on the nine to five job who's just earning a single paycheck. That's what it means to have a fair tax system. The bigger, more complicated, more wealthy you are shouldn't mean it's harder for the government to figure out what you owe. It should be equal. And that will

will help the country in a variety of different ways, a fair tax system. But also, if you're the CEO or CFO of a large company and you're playing by the rules, you want an IRS that can hold your competitors accountable for playing by the rules. And you want an IRS that is smart enough not to audit you.

Because we've built the capacity and the insight to see evasion more clearly. And then we know to leave you alone if you're playing by the rules. So it actually is a rising tide that lifts all ships. But it is easy to make fun of or to castigate as unpopular because it's the iconic IRS. And that's a headwind that myself and all other previous commissioners have to deal with. Yeah.

We're going to go into break in a minute here, but we're going to talk about the popularity of taxes with Vanessa Williamson after break. We're talking right now with Daniel Werfel, former IRS commissioner who served during the Biden administration. Of course, the Trump administration announced cuts to the IRS of 6,700 employees or 7% of the IRS workforce right here in the middle of tax season.

We also want to hear from you. Are you a current IRS employee, former employee? Maybe you're in the tax preparation business. How are you making sense of these cuts and what they may or may not do to what you're doing and the nation? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-7000.

That's 866-733-6786. Of course, you can email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org, or you can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, Discord, or KQED Forum. We'll be back with more on your taxes right after the break.

Support for KQED's podcasts come from San Francisco International Airport. Did you know that SFO has a world-class museum? Get ready to be wowed by art, history, science, and cultural exhibitions throughout the terminals. Learn more at flysfo.com slash museum.

Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about the Trump administration's cuts to the IRS, which come, of course, right here in the middle of tax season. We're joined by Daniel Werfel, who's former IRS commissioner, as well as Vanessa Williamson, senior fellow at the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center.

And, of course, we want to hear from you your questions about how the IRS works and how these cuts may play out. Number is 866-733-6786. The email is forum at kqed.org. And on social media, we're KQED Forum. Vanessa Williamson, before the break, we were talking about how Americans feel about paying their taxes. And, of course, Danny kind of mentioned it, the fact that...

that the IRS can be the butt of jokes, right? It can be something where people are like, ah, the IRS, you know, it's kind of one of those things. But how do people really feel about paying their taxes based on the survey work that we have?

So Americans might be surprised to learn that Americans actually have a lot of pride in taxpaying. So if you ask people, you know, do you think taxpaying is a civic duty? More than 90% of Americans agree that yes, it is an important civic duty. They'll disagree if you say, you know, oh, the government wastes a lot of money, so it's fine to hold back on your taxes. They say, no, it's not okay to do that. Taxpaying is seen as patriotic by most Americans.

But they do have a lot of frustrations. And if you ask them what they're frustrated about, the consistent answers over literally decades are that wealthy people and corporations aren't paying their share. So when we think about people's frustration with taxes, which are very real, it's important to recognize that it's not, you know, people don't want to shirk their responsibilities. They just want to make sure everyone's doing their part.

You know, one listener says, "I don't mind paying taxes. I do mind that others do not. Hearing that Trump doesn't pay taxes or that corporations are able to figure out legal loopholes to decrease their tax burden, well, that drives me nuts." That seems to check out with what you're saying. That's pretty typical, yeah. Yeah. So there has been over the last, say, 50 years since the tax revolt of the 1970s, there has been a lot of policy success for anti-tax people.

How can that be true when also, as you say, Americans have a lot of pride in paying their taxes?

Well, unfortunately, you know, politics, or however you want to feel about it, politics is not a public opinion poll, right? There are a lot of areas where most Americans agree on something, everything from raising the minimum wage to stronger gun control, all kinds of issues across the spectrum, where most Americans feel something and it's not what gets done. So our politics just isn't a particularly good representation of what most Americans believe on a lot of issues and on this one as well.

Do you see these IRS cuts as sort of part of the sort of conservative platform of trying to cut taxes by any means necessary?

Yeah, I think there's been over decades, as you say, a real commitment. And, you know, that changed and developed over time on the right to a really knee-jerk anti-tax position, right? And the Republican Party used to be a party of balanced budgets, a party that, you know, was focused on the bottom line. But over time, it became more sort of ideologically committed specifically to cutting taxes in all circumstances. And you can see that with

Grover Norquist and later Newt Gingrich and on. And one sort of consequence of that increasingly extreme commitment to an anti-tax position has been increasing attacks on the IRS as an agency. I mean, I believe the reputation of the IRS is that it is an underfunded agency. What kind of impact does underfunding the IRS actually have, though?

Yeah, so we know a little bit, as former Commissioner Werfel said, the cuts that have occurred in the last few weeks are absolutely unprecedented in that they came in the middle of tax season, that they don't have a congressional mandate explaining them. There's a lot of ways that this is absolutely unprecedented. And I think from a democratic accountability perspective, extremely troubling. But we do know what happens to the IRS when it's underfunded. It was terribly underfunded for many years.

and it lost a lot of staff in the 2010s. And what happens is folks at the IRS work really hard to try and limit these problems, but the reality is they stop having enough folks to answer their phones when you call and have questions, and they stop being able to do the kind of

difficult, challenging audits that are required to figure out whether people at the top of the income spectrum are paying their share. So what you'll see is when you drastically reduce support for the IRS is that normal, honest taxpayers who just have a question, they won't be able to go to a local tax assistance center. A lot of those have been closed now this year. They won't be able to get someone on the phone to help them out.

And then at the other end of the spectrum, if you have a very complicated tax scenario and a lot of accountants and lawyers on your side, you may be able to get away with things that your peers who are being more honest won't. Really interesting call coming in from San Jose. Welcome to the show. Hello. Hey, go ahead. What's your story?

Yeah, so first of all, I'd like to say hi to the commissioner there. I worked under Kerry Holland. So I work in the IRS, and I worked under the Office of Civil Rights and Compliance, and I do reasonable accommodations for employees. And from what I'm seeing right now, it's just really ugly. Yeah.

My people are really scared. I mean, I don't, my job, I don't feel like my job is, is secure anymore. And I've worked for the federal government, but other agencies for a long time. And I've never had that fear. Um, but I'm seeing some, like all of our senior staff are retiring early. Employees are, are very confused, very fearful. And I'm, and these are folks that these are folks that I'm serving in

in terms of their RA requests. And a lot of them are just, they just, you know what, I can't, like today I had a meeting with someone and they just said, well, I guess I'm just going to have to retire now. And so there is a lot of...

It's just a lot of fear. That's the environment that I would describe fear and anxiety all throughout the agency. So let's just think about for a minute your work on reasonable accommodations. So what is that if you're unable to do that work because parts of the org chart are disappearing before your eyes? What would that mean for an actual person who's trying to work on their taxes?

Well, it's still a needed job, but I mean, there are people who, you know, with disabilities who are not going to be able to get their request serviced. I mean, even right now, right now, from what there has been a pause in funding, I wouldn't say a pause, but now an extra step.

for example, ergonomic chair for folks to be able to work. Now, from what I understand, there's a DOGE team member who's actually assigned to each agency who has to approve the funding. And so it's going to take longer for... And if it's even approved. I'm just assuming it's going to get approved.

So that's what's going on. Less people are going to get served. I used to think I was protected because my job falls under enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendment as well as the Rehabilitation Act, but I don't know. So that's my situation. I really appreciate you just sharing kind of like the inside perspective with us on this.

on what you're experiencing there. I mean, um, Danny Warfel, um, how do you respond? Well, first let me say it's good to hear from, from, uh, uh, an IRS, uh, team member. Look, you know, I always have had the philosophy that whether you're, uh, advocating for small government or big government, you want the government to work effectively. Um,

If the government is working effectively, it's better for all Americans, regardless of the size of government. And so as you are, let's say, creating a smaller government, if that's the ambition and that's the direction that they're going, you want to make sure that the people that are going to remain are continuing to be productive. And for federal employees to do their jobs effectively,

They need to feel both physical safety and psychological safety. They need training. They need technology tools. Like any other organization, right? Like any other organization in the world. And kind of a shock and awe approach to the way in which you're downsizing, where it is creating stress, not just for the people that are leaving, but for the people that are staying. Yeah.

is inevitably going to harm productivity. And again, that harm to productivity, just in addition to the harm it's doing to these employees,

who, by the way, who are IRS employees. 98% of them work outside of D.C. They're veterans. They're members of military families. They're Little League coaches, moms, dads, people of faith. They can even be a jerk, you know. That's also possible, too, but there's still people who work. I mean, with an organization of that size, you get every walk of life, you know. And you get humans that make mistakes and are fallible. So, yeah.

But for those that are going to be absolutely necessary to make sure that we have a functioning tax system and you need a functioning tax system for a functioning country.

Right. Then you want those individuals to to work and earn their paycheck and be productive and and under constant fear of what's next, losing their job. Am I going to get an email that says I have an hour to vacate the premises without any transparency of what's coming next?

It's going to harm productivity and that should concern people because, again, smaller government, if that's what you're interested in. But I still think you want the government to work. You don't want to be waiting on hold to get through to the government for hours and hours. You know, Vanessa Williamson, you know, obviously what Daniel Werfel is saying seems quite reasonable, you know, that no matter what size government,

that you believe government should be. You want it to be productive and to work well. So why is this happening? A listener has a theory we want to run by here. Listener writes, "Seems pretty obvious that this dismantling of our infrastructures, social security, IRS, Medicaid, et cetera, is a strategy to create enough chaos to be able to say, 'See, it's not working. Therefore, we need to privatize these basic programs that run our country.'"

I predict we'll see this with Social Security checks arriving with mistakes, example $10, $20, $30 off. Then the recipient tries to call and correct it. No one answers the phone. Cue and cry, and thus the justification for further destruction. Is that your read on it? I mean, I think that...

The long-standing confusion of efficiency with cost-cutting in how we talk about government is bearing some pretty bitter fruit right now. We need to think seriously about what it takes for our government to work well.

And that conversation has gotten lost. And, you know, the reality is that there are all kinds of really spectacular investments. And I think Commissioner Werfel has been a little bit modest about the amount of really amazing work that was occurring just a few years ago in things like direct fire.

This is a new pilot program launched last year. It's still available this year. And it did the thing that Americans have been talking about for years, that they wanted, which is that it's a public free tax prep service. So you're not wondering why you have to figure out your taxes and then send it into the IRS. The IRS set up a system and you can do your taxes online. This year they've started to roll out data pre-population so that you can see the information the IRS already has on that W-2 or the 1099. But those things take investment time.

Right. That is, of course, massively more efficient. But you have to invest to get there. I think you're you're you're callers really onto something when they talk about some of the potential cronyism that I think we can expect to see in the way things are working these days. And in particular, you know, when we think about big government versus small government, government can't be so small that it fits in someone's pocket. Right. And I think that's a serious concern to consider this year. Let's bring in David in San Rafael. Welcome, David.

Good morning. I'm a 40-year veteran enrolled agent. I interact with the IRS at all levels, collection, audit representation, tax practitioner hotline. These budget cuts are beyond stupid and self-destructive. It's ridiculous. I mean, Marin County is one of the fifth or seventh wealthiest counties in the whole country, and they had 10 years they didn't hire anybody going into the IRS office like a ghost town.

It was ridiculous. They need to collect revenue. And it's not... My comment's non-political. It's just you have to be smart. It's fine to transition into updated electronic processing, but you have to give them the money to do it. You don't cut the money. Yeah, David, appreciate that perspective. I mean...

Former Commissioner Werfel, I mean, I think you want to walk us through a couple of the things that you were able to do? Because my understanding is that in the Inflation Reduction Act, there was some money for the IRS to do some of these things. Yeah, I mean, we had a vision that the Inflation Reduction Act allowed us to have because we had funding for the first time. First thing we needed to do was just kind of plug the holes in the dam because before the Inflation Reduction Act happened,

We were really at the bottom of the barrel in terms of resources and performance. We had record poor performance on the phones, record poor access to our walk-in centers. We had record high paper backlogs, anemic audit rates, reduced collections, etc. So first thing, let's deploy funds, get staff in place so that we can answer more calls, have more walk-in appointments, etc.

manage the paper that was coming in, et cetera. So that was very successful. But then we also had a vision where every taxpayer in the country should be able to do their entire tax responsibilities digitally or online if they choose, just like they can go do all their shopping. During COVID, most industries reset to meet

meet their customers where they were, which was at home, unfortunately. But without the investments, the IRS couldn't do the same. And I used to talk about online banking as how advanced that has become, where you don't ever need to go to a bricks and mortar bank or ever submit paper. And not only did it make it more customer friendly, it made it more accurate and reduced errors for banks. And their 1-800 calls went down precipitously so they could downsize their call centers.

So, we started really building infrastructure into what we call the individual account and the business account so that you as an individual, Alexis, could sign on and see everything and do everything just from your account or your business could do the same.

And a lot of progress was being made. And it's not just about a website. In order to make those websites sing, we had a lot of cleanup to do in terms of the data and old software and old hardware and old computer language that sits behind that website.

And we were working as hard and as furiously as we could. Think about it as spans of a bridge across the water. Some of the spans we're able to get across, so you can now do things on the website in full, but some of the spans made it halfway when I stepped down.

And when and when we have a new president. And so the question that I pose is, are we going to complete those spans across the water so that so that increasingly taxpayers can have a more easy experience meeting their tax obligations because the tax laws don't get any easier.

They seem to get more complicated. Our tax system seems to grow in complexity. So it's really important to allow the IRS to modernize so that we can do or the IRS can do its part in simplifying the journey for taxpayers. Mm-hmm.

We've got some listeners writing in with some thoughts. One writes in to say,

clear this is not doge alone but all the republicans who are abdicating their responsibility letting this happen uh one listener uh noel over on the discord writes you know russell vote the new head of the omb has explicitly said that he wants federal employees to hate getting up in the morning to go to work um

We are talking about these cuts to the IRS. Last week, about 7% of the workforce got fired, 6,700 employees. It's the middle of tax season. We're kind of spinning out some of the repercussions and why that's happening. We're joined by Daniel Werfel, former IRS commissioner. He served during the Biden administration, resigned in 2025.

We're also joined by Vanessa Williamson, who's a senior fellow at the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center. She's the author of Read My Lips, Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes. And of course, we're getting your calls and comments as well, but how you're feeling about what's happening to the IRS. Maybe you're an IRS employee, former employee, maybe you're in the tax business, maybe you're

you know, just have questions about what's happening there. You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786, forum at kqed.org, or you can find us on Blue Sky, Instagram, Discord. We're KQED Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more.

Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about Trump's cuts to the IRS with Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center, and Daniel Werfel, former IRS commissioner. Daniel, I wanted to ask you about...

some of the other kind of more unusual things that are going on. The Washington Post reported that a Doge software engineer named Gavin Kleiger sought, quote, sought access from the IRS to granular tax data on virtually every person, business and nonprofit in the country, leading the Treasury Department to block Doge access to personal taxpayer data. You know, this attempt to access taxpayer data, it sounds troubling from a from a privacy point of view and outside the government, but

What level of access do other agencies normally have to taxpayer data? Well, there's a very strict set of laws involved in whether the IRS can release your taxpayer data to another federal agency. There's a lot of procedures. Look, I think what is happening here is actually something that happens every day. And let me explain that.

Let's say there's a new employee or a new contractor who arrives at the IRS and says, I need access to a bunch of taxpayer data. At that moment, what happens is the IRS goes through a process, just like any organization with sensitive assets or infrastructure would do, where they start asking questions. Okay, what do you need the information for?

How long do you need to have the information? What are the evidence of your trustworthiness to have data or information of this sensitivity? These questions, I've summarized them here, but they're longer and more involved. But these are the questions that anyone would ask. Imagine an employee on their first day walks into Amazon and

as their employer and says, "I need the credit card information for every customer of Amazon." The chief information officer or the chief data person would say, "Oh, that's interesting. Why do you need all that information? What are you going to use it for? How long do you need it for?" Maybe they might laugh that person out of the room. I don't know. But if it was a legitimate request,

What they would end up doing is figuring out and they would right-size the exact data that you need at what level of detail for how long. They would likely put in protocols around whether that needed to be supervised, whether you needed to maybe do it in a secure facility and then leave the data behind. There'd be all these questions.

And this is what I believe was happening at the IRS when this individual asked for the information. And I think there was a tension there because the individual or individuals wanted the information yesterday and wanted all of it. And the IRS was like, no, we have a process we go through to ask all these questions. And as now a private citizen and taxpayer, I'm glad they're asking these questions. I want my taxpayer data protected.

And I don't want the IRS to deviate from best practice standard operating protocols for how you increase access to sensitive data. Let's bring in another caller here. Let's bring in Damien in Santa Rosa. Welcome, Damien.

Thanks so much for taking my call. I just want to say that I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, and I'm not a fan of this administration or the actions that they're taking in slashing these federal workforces, but I don't think it does us a great duty as an electorate to pretend like we enjoy interacting with these agencies or that everything was good or that we shouldn't have reform. We're sort of allying ourselves with a very unpopular bureaucracy, and I think that's

which i appreciate that of a small business owner they dealing with just i don't know idle with the s_b_a_ uh... that that disaster and pandemic loans the process of the terrible for the last few years i will reform in there so badly i will reform in my i_r_s_ processes anybody's ever gone through an audit knows how frustrating that is or trying to deal with the i_r_s_ on the phone etc

i want reform i want them to be more functional and better i don't appreciate that the methodology with how they're doing it and i think it's gonna be negative for us taxpayers of small business owners that this implementation but to pretend like everything was good before i can't we just go back to the way it was i think it's terrible we need actual reform not this horrific slashing an implementation but trust me i could use a better product coming out of the federal government and i appreciate that uh... you know kind of

perspective and kind of varied. Talk to us about that, Daniel Werfel, you know, the possibility of real reform, what you think that would look like to maybe satisfy some of these concerns that Damien has had. Well, first of all, I 100% agree with Damien. I do think there's a risk as I'm talking that it sounds like I'm defending the status quo, and I don't mean to.

I, when I was at the IRS, was crafting a reform agenda. It was far more incremental than what we're seeing now. And that's worthy of criticism.

Maybe the reform agenda that I was leading could have been more aggressive. I'd certainly be open to those conversations and to that approach. I do think that the U.S. government as a whole is filled with

as any large bureaucracy with imperfections. I think there are very dedicated, talented public servants over time that have made progress, often two steps forward for every one step back, that have improved, that have moved more and more federal agencies into the 21st century.

But we often remember that moment of failure where we couldn't get through or the form was overly complicated or, you know, you just had this kind of frustrating moment versus the many, many, many moments where the government touches our lives in a positive way that we might not even know it.

or that we interact and have a positive experience. And so I think that for me, the right thing to do is to not focus necessarily on the employees, but on what we lose in terms of the delivery of mission, right? So, you know, you raised a quote earlier, I want employees to be, you know, upset when they wake up. I think the conversation should be more around what...

medical care do we want for our veterans at veterans hospitals? What performance do we want in terms of the food safety at restaurants around the country? How quick and easy should it be to make a reservation at a national park? These are the fundamental questions that we should ask. And then behind those questions, there should be an efficient and increasingly efficient government. It's never going to be perfect,

But we should become more modern and we should become more cost effective. But I really think that the better conversation to have is oriented around what does the government provide? What would happen if it went away? And what do we want from our government? I think if you zeroed in on that, you'd have more agreement across the political spectrum that everyone wants that veteran to get

Yeah.

You know, Vanessa, here's one for you. Another listener writes in to say, should Californians and residents of other blue states go on a federal tax strike? It's hard for me to justify paying federal taxes when the federal government is cutting all social programs and withholding federal aid from our state. Even though we're net contributors to the federal coffers, I'd rather give my money to my state where I'm sure it'll be spent in a reasonable way on things I actually want the government to do.

Yeah, that's a great question. First, I want to follow up a little bit on what was just said, because I think it is a real mistake to confuse a reform agenda that is actually aimed at improving the IRS with the things that are happening currently. That is, I mean, they're just not, they're qualitatively different events. The kind of chaos that is occurring now is not a reform agenda.

because it is not targeted in any way that would make things better. It is destructive. And so I think that to confuse those issues, right, to allow the sort of weaponization of conversations about improvements and waste and things are too slow, to have that conversation at all be related to suddenly firing 7,000 IRS workers mid-tax season, I think it's a disservice. On the question of a tax strike,

This is, I think there are many reasons why I would like to see Americans more engaged in our politics, more engaged in looking at what's going on, and more frankly concerned about the way political events are unfolding in Washington, D.C. I don't actually think a tax strike is the right approach, and there are a couple of reasons for that. One, for the vast majority of Americans, the IRS

you have things like withholding, right? So you've actually already paid your taxes, so you should definitely file. You've got a refund coming. So for the vast majority of Americans, a tax strike is basically not available as an option at this point. So strikes work when they are widespread, and this, in some sense, could not be. It also is, of course, against the law, so it's quite a large risk to be taking. It also has the problem, because taxes are filed privately, if you're going to do a collective action situation,

thing. It's good to do those in public places. That's why there are picket lines outside businesses when there are strikes. So if you're looking for a collective action response to the things that you're upset about in the way that politics are happening in D.C., I wholeheartedly think that that is good. It is part of the American tradition. It's something I would support. I just don't think a tax strike is the strategy to get you there. What do you think people can do who feel upset about these set of cuts?

Well, I think, you know, there are Americans organizing across the country. I've observed here in D.C. and I've seen media coverage to some extent of protests, of going to town hall meetings held by your congressman. You can call, as I understood it, for some weeks that you couldn't get through in the Senate because there were so many calls coming in. And these are, you know, sort of traditional ways that people engage to express their views in politics. And they're traditional for a reason. It's because they work.

So there are, I think, a lot of ways that, you know, for the callers and people who have written in who you've shared with us who are really concerned about what's going on, you know, this is America and you're a citizen, and there are a lot of ways for you to express those views and you have more power than you know. Yeah. Lots of folks expressing their views by writing into the show. Paul writes in to say, I like paying taxes. With them, I buy Civilization Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

During the 1950s, when America was great, I believe the top marginal tax rate was something like 90%. Will Trump bring that part back too? Stephen writes,

You can see the way these comments are trending here. Chirt on Discord writes, I read that they cut funding for the free file program, which is a very efficient way to get returns filed. So I don't believe Doge is about efficiency, but a wild rampage of power drunk maniacs setting to upend society. Some of the tamer comments that have come in. We have been talking about the cuts previously.

to the IRS made by the Trump administration. We're joined by Daniel Werfel, former IRS commissioner who served during the Biden administration. We're also joined by Vanessa Williamson, who's a senior fellow at the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center and the author of the book, Read My Lips, Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes. You know, this is a fundraising time for KQED. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

We have a couple other topics to get to. In particular, and I wanted to get an answer from you on this, Daniel Werfel, there have been some reports that the Department of Homeland Security has also asked for taxpayer records around immigration initiatives. Is that a typical use and we're just kind of paying attention to it now because of the administration's other actions or is that atypical?

It's atypical. I mean, again, there's a part of the law, Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, which strictly prohibits the IRS sharing data with other federal agencies unless the law explicitly allows it. So, for example, the IRS can...

is authorized to share taxpayer data with the Department of Education for the purposes of both simplifying the process of applying with the Department of Education for student aid, because you can pre-populate the last year's adjusted gross income or AGI data field. It makes it easier. And it reduces the risk of an overpayment of a Pell Grant that is higher than what the individual is actually eligible for.

And there's a whole list of federal programs that have gone through a process with Congress

with House Ways and Means and Senate Finance and then up to the full Congress and signed by the president. And every change that I'm aware of to this section to increase access to yet another federal agency is very involved. Sometimes it takes years to convince Congress and to get all the stakeholders aligned to have that information shared. Because

Because it is such an important part of building trust that your taxpayer information is safe. You know, the example I like to give is, let's say four people have access to your tax information today. If we now move to five, that is an additional person that could accidentally leave their laptop on the metro system, right? So every time you add a person, you add risk that the information could get out there in a way that you don't want it out there.

And so every time we add a new federal agency to the mix, you increase the likelihood of that person leaving their laptop on the metro and the information getting out there. That's why we go through these process, not because we want the government to be slow in plotting. It's like, did you hear what he just said? He just said it takes years to get this done. Why is the government so slow? I think part of that slowness can sometimes be the right check and balance.

to make sure that we don't open the doors to wider data sharing without making sure that we've really closely considered the security and privacy implications of doing so. And here we go on the opposite end of the spectrum. We have a listener on the Discord writes, I haven't filed my taxes yet. Will the cuts in staffing cause problems for tax returns? That is to say, like, should people be filing now? Should they wait to figure out what's going on? Like, what's happening? Well, they should file. I mean, look, the...

When I was working with the other commissioners on the op-ed and we were chatting about things, we all reflected that during filing season, which runs from late January to April 15th, is the last time you want to do anything out of the ordinary. You want steady as she goes. You don't want to increase operational complexity or risk.

And so, you know, we didn't like the layoffs, but if you're going to do them, we would have said wait till after filing season because you want to preserve the stability of filing season. And so that's...

Not to say that there's a guarantee that these layoffs will result in significant disruption. It just increases risk. And you don't want to do that. You don't want to increase risk for the American people that their refunds will be delayed or errors will be made with respect to their taxes.

That being said, I don't think there's any difference in terms of whether you submit your taxes now or you wait till April 15th. When you're ready, when you feel comfortable, as long as it's before April 15th, I'd file. Last comment from a listener. Sandy writes, I'm a career government employee, retired nurse, Department of Veterans Affairs.

People are interested in some of that institutional, those questions.

Take a listen to our show that we did with Jennifer Palka, which was about kind of trying to figure out how to reform the technological infrastructure of federal bureaucracies and how difficult it is to understand exactly how many of our longtime systems work precisely because they need to be so big and they need to work for everyone.

We've been talking about Trump's cut to the IRS. We've been joined by Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. We've also been joined by Daniel Werfel, former IRS commissioner who served during the Biden administration, resigned in January 2025. Thank you so much for joining us, Daniel. Thank you, Alexis.

Thank you to our listeners for so many comments and calls. We really appreciate your engagement with the show and the topic. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Meena Kim.

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