No, Trump's IRS Cuts Did Not Return Staffing to 2020 Levels — They Would Cut Far Deeper

The claim, promoted by administration officials and allies in early 2025, is that DOGE-driven IRS workforce reductions simply undid the hiring surge funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and returned the agency to where it stood in 2020. The verdict is partially false: the cuts go significantly further than that framing suggests, and multiple independent sources confirm it.

The hard numbers tell the story clearly. According to the IRS Data Book, the agency employed approximately 73,554 full-time equivalent workers in FY2020. The IRA hiring surge pushed that figure to roughly 89,003 FTEs by FY2023. In February 2025, the Trump administration terminated approximately 6,700 IRS probationary employees, according to NTEU court filings, and paired those firings with voluntary separation incentives. The projected result, per both NTEU and TIGTA workforce analyses, is an IRS headcount of roughly 60,000 FTEs — not 73,554.

The steelman version of the claim has a kernel of truth worth acknowledging. The IRA did fund a dramatic staffing expansion, and the administration was genuinely targeting those post-2022 additions. If the goal were only to reverse IRA hiring, landing near 73,000 to 79,000 FTEs would be the logical endpoint. That framing is where the '2020 levels' talking point draws its surface plausibility.

But the arithmetic breaks the argument. Cutting from 89,003 down to ~60,000 removes roughly 29,000 positions. Cutting only the IRA-era additions would have removed closer to 10,000 to 16,000. The gap between those two numbers is the tell. TIGTA warned explicitly in early 2025 that the proposed reductions would cut into pre-IRA baseline staffing, not merely reverse it, and would bring the agency to levels not seen since the 1970s or 1980s. Treasury officials themselves, according to Associated Press and ProPublica reporting in March 2025, acknowledged the cuts would go below pre-IRA baselines — directly contradicting the administration's own public framing.

The Congressional Budget Office adds further context: the IRA allocated $80 billion to the IRS over a decade, and the Trump administration rescinded approximately $20.2 billion of that in early 2025. Rescinding a quarter of the funding while terminating a far larger share of the workforce than IRA hiring accounts for is not a return to 2020 — it is a structural reduction of the agency.

The manipulation pattern here is a false denominator. By anchoring the comparison to 2020 rather than to the actual projected endpoint, the framing makes a cut to ~60,000 sound like a cut to ~73,554. The number '2020' is technically in the right neighborhood to sound credible, but it describes the starting point of the rollback, not where the cuts stop. Watch for this technique whenever a workforce or budget reduction is described by its starting reference year rather than its projected final figure — the gap between those two numbers is almost always where the real story lives.