The IRS in 2025: A chaotic year in review

You thought you had a hectic 2025? Call up your buddies at the IRS, where busy season officially lasted all year, thanks in part to a rotating cast of commissioners, mass layoffs, and a government shutdown. IRS? More like “IRStress,” amirite?

As the new year approaches, we’re looking back at everything that happened over at the IRS in 2025, and delusionally pretending it can all fit in one article.

The year certainly started with a bang. In January, former IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said he would step down that month, a surprise exit ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Werfel was supposed to stay until 2027, as commissioners typically serve five-year terms, but President Trump nominated former Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) to take over as commissioner, putting Werfel in an awkward and abnormal spot.

Then in February, the IRS cut over 6,000 jobs as part of a wider federal government trimming led by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

The cuts, which occurred as busy season kicked off, mainly concerned probationary workers, primarily recent hires who “were not deemed critical to filing season,” according to internal emails about termination plans. Given the lack of resources at the IRS, government watchdogs and former IRS officials argued that layoffs, rather than streamlining the agency, would hinder efficiency.

It was against this backdrop that Doug O’Donnell, who stepped in as interim commissioner following Werfel’s departure, announced his retirement in late February. IRS COO Melanie Krause became acting IRS commissioner in O’Donnell’s absence.

Not long after, in early March, Senate Democrats called upon the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) to investigate if the mass IRS layoffs “will undermine initiatives that the agency has undertaken to improve collections, crack down on complex tax avoidance and evasion by high-income taxpayers and large businesses, and enhance the quality of taxpayer services for honest Americans seeking to file their taxes.”

Then, April showers brought…more chaos. Krause—maybe you remember her from one paragraph ago—resigned in April, not long after the IRS and Department of Homeland Security reached a deal to share confidential taxpayer information of potential undocumented immigrants with federal immigration authorities. Two people familiar with the decision told the Associated Press that Krause quit over the data-sharing deal.

From then on, it was officially a game of musical chairs for the commissioner seat. Trump’s pick to replace Krause as acting commissioner—Gary Shapley—was replaced in a matter of days. (Yes, days.) Michael Faulkender stepped into the acting position on April 19, becoming the third acting commissioner…that week.

By June, Billy Long was finally confirmed by the Senate and sworn in as commissioner, but his tenure was Really Short: He lasted in the post for a whopping…53 days.

In August, the Department of Homeland Security requested the IRS cross-check addresses for 40,000 undocumented immigrants, and the agency could only verify around 3% while refusing “to provide additional information on the taxpayers, such as whether they’d applied for the earned income tax credit, citing privacy concerns,” CFO Brew previously reported. Long said the IRS would not release data “outside of the confines of the IRS’s agreement with DHS,” the Washington Post reported.

It’s unclear if that was the sole reason for Long’s ousting, but in any case, he was out and Scott Bessent was in as acting commissioner. In one of the weirdest twists of a chaotic year, Long, whose prior tax experience was a three-day course, said he would be nominated to become the next US ambassador to Iceland. Cool.

Also in August, the IRS posted job openings for about 4,500 customer service employees in its Taxpayer Service division (after convincing around 9,000 employees in that division to resign earlier in the year). Oops!

And if you thought the drama would slow down as summer turned to fall, you’d have missed the point of this whole article. Who could forget about the government shutdown? The bulk of tax refunds weren’t paid, live telephone customer service support was limited, and walk-in taxpayer assistance centers were closed, according to the IRS.

Take it from former IRS commissioners: That period of time surely wasn’t fun for employees.

Oh, and then there was the whole IRS CEO thing. In October, acting commissioner Bessent named Frank Bisignano, who already had one full-time job as head of the Social Security Administration, CEO of the IRS. What’s that? CEO of the IRS is a new job that no one has ever had before and this guy already has one stressful, time-consuming job? Yeah, well, it’s 2025 at the IRS. This is what it’s like.

Here’s hoping for less chaos in 2026.