A January report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that the Internal Revenue Service had lost approximately 19,000 employees — about 19 percent of its 2021 headcount, and closer to 27 percent on broader comparisons against the 2021 peak of 102,000. [1] The Direct File program lost 88 percent of its staff in 2025. Online Services lost 100 percent. The departments that process returns lost 17 percent. [2] The IRS entered 2026 with two million items of unprocessed correspondence in its queue — a backlog up 33 percent year over year — and a 43-day fall 2025 government shutdown compounded everything.

The service-journalism version and the political-accountability version are the same sentence. The IRS set its phone-service target at 70 percent for the 2026 season; the prior target was 85. [3] The agency authorized 2,200 new hires for return-processing and amended-returns teams. As of late December 2025, fifty had been onboarded. The training window is 60 to 80 days — long enough that a December hire is not meaningfully useful by April 15. TIGTA's own warning was that the shortages "may affect the IRS's ability to timely process tax returns, resulting in delays." [3]

For filers: the nominal twenty-one-day e-file-plus-direct-deposit timeline still covers clean returns. Paper returns mailed in April are running six to twelve weeks. Returns with Earned Income Tax Credit claims, identity-verification flags or mismatched W-2 data are running forty-five to one hundred twenty days. The Taxpayer Advocate Service processed more than two hundred thousand hardship cases in the most recent full fiscal year; the 2026 number will not be smaller. [1]

The IRS is not unique — every civilian agency has absorbed some version of this year's cuts. It is the one nearly every American household interacts with annually. The refund that does not arrive the third week of April is how the cuts become visible.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York