The Daily Fuckup

The IRS is moving through the 2026 filing season with a much thinner roster than it had a year earlier, and lawmakers are using that gap to press a familiar question: can the agency still handle the volume?

The filing season opened on Jan. 26, 2026, and the IRS said it expected about 164 million individual tax returns for tax year 2025. In an April 1 letter, Sen. Richard Blumenthal said the agency had lost more than 27,000 employees over the previous year, a drop he described as nearly one-third of the workforce, and warned that staffing cuts, hiring problems and leadership instability could strain IRS operations.

The Taxpayer Advocate Service has put the decline in even starker terms. In a January report, it said the IRS started 2025 with about 102,000 employees and ended the year with about 74,000, a reduction of 27%. That report said staffing losses, along with major tax-law changes, create added pressure for both taxpayers and the agency, especially when a return gets stuck and needs a human to fix it.

The IRS has said most refunds are issued within 21 days when returns are filed electronically and taxpayers choose direct deposit. It has also said some returns take longer because they require extra review. The agency’s filing-season announcement covered timing, refund guidance and online tools; the staffing decline comes from the watchdog report and Blumenthal’s letter, not from that release.

The practical problem is simple enough. Fewer workers can mean longer waits on the phone, slower responses to notices and less room for error when a return needs hands-on help. The filing season may be open, but the question is whether the IRS has enough people left to keep routine problems from becoming backlog.