Draining the Biden Swamp: 6000 IRS Probies to Get Laid Off

But it’s taaaaaaaaaax season, laments CNN. Indeed it is, and it’s time that the government stops being so taxing to its citizenry. 

Thanks to civil service rules, Donald Trump can’t summarily lay off the entire federal bureaucracy. He can, however, direct agencies to cut loose any bureaucrats still in their probationary periods, and that especially includes the IRS, where Joe Biden attempted to add 87,000 new employees to wring more cash out of taxpayers. Six thousand probies will hit the bricks today, according to CNN:

The Internal Revenue Service is expected to fire about 6,000 workers Thursday, according to a source familiar with the agency’s plans.

The government workers who will lose their jobs were more recently hired and therefore have probationary status, making them easier to cut loose, the source said.

The IRS workers who will be fired are described as largely auditors and support workers involved in compliance work, many of whom were hired during the last months of the Biden administration.

Emphasis mine. If they are probationary, then they all would have been hired in the past year of the Biden administration. And for a specific purpose, too. 

As one will recall, Biden got the funding for 87,000 new IRS agents as part of his falsely named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was in actuality a watered-down Green New Deal. How would adding 87,000 new IRS agents to drill down into taxpayer returns help fight inflation, after all? The purpose of those agents was to bully taxpayers into conceding disputed claims and rake in more money for Biden’s pet Green New Deal projects that the IRA funded, making the bill as close to revenue-neutral as then-Senator Joe Manchin required for his vote. 

In other words, this won’t do anything to the IRS except return it to the status quo ante 2023 — if that. It’s not clear how many of those 87,000 positions got filled early enough to lock in civil-service protections for Biden’s horde of auditors. And since we can expect Biden’s pet projects to get shut down soon through the DOGE-enabled spending cut-offs, we won’t need that extra revenue after all, either. 

It’s worth pointing out too that the Protection Racket Media and Democrats (pardon the redundancy) have been shrieking over a few hundred DOGE workers gaining access to taxpayer records at the IRS, as well as at Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. Those workers have to follow the same privacy-protection rules that apply throughout the federal government, of course. However, none of these same voices bothered to even question Biden’s plan to grant the same access to 87,000 people off the street in order to gin up funding for Biden’s pet Green New Deal projects. 

Now the most recent six thousand of that horde will get their walking papers today. That’s a good start at reversing the weaponization of government against the electorate, but it’s only a start.

Can this go too far, too fast? Sure, and we should be watchful for that, especially in the medical-assistance fields. At least at the moment, the layoffs have been confined to the probies, which means the impacts should be minimal in general, but could have deleterious effects in specific cases. Hopefully, Cabinet officials will remain vigilant to ensure that legitimate services remain unaffected while the swamp gets drained of the deadwood and worse. But it’s also worth remembering that Trump tried doing this through normal channels in his first term, and was rewarded with obstruction, insubordination, and the bureaucracy’s version of La Résistance. This time, Trump won’t wait around for that reaction to accomplish what he set out to do.