Beth Crowell was proud to work for the IRS.

She had spent much of her career as an accountant for large corporations, gaining intimate knowledge about how they do — and sometimes don’t — pay the taxes they owe.

Working for the IRS in Colorado, she hoped to put her skills to a new use. She wanted to help collect more money for the federal government.

Not long after joining last July, she had her chance. Crowell, 64, joined a team that had started an audit of a company earning roughly $3 billion a year. The IRS had never examined the firm before, Crowell said, because the agency hadn’t had enough employees with the skills for such complex cases. “They’re a large multinational company, and it is not a normal thing to not have been examined,” she said, declining to name the firm.

By hiring Crowell and thousands of other experienced tax professionals like her last year, the IRS was trying to fill those gaps and rebuild its ability to enforce tax laws after years of decay. The effort was expected to help the United States recoup billions in additional tax revenue.Then the layoffs started. With Trump administration targeting recent hires across the government, the terminations hit particularly hard in Crowell’s division, large business and international. Many of the more than 7,000 people laid off from the IRS so far worked in her department.

As a result, the IRS may struggle even more with its basic mission of collecting taxes. Work-intensive investigations into large businesses and rich Americans could decline, a drop in enforcement that would add to the deficit even as Elon Musk says his team is helping narrow it.

The audit Crowell was in the middle of conducting is now adrift. Five of the nine people working on it, including Crowell, were laid off. What she called a slam-dunk case for the IRS may not be finished.

“We were going to work through these issues and have it done in an effective professional and collaborative manner,” she said. “All of the momentum we had is gone. I’m not sure they’re going to be positioned and have the support they need to restructure and reconvene to overcome all of this.”

Firing probationary employees like Crowell was just the beginning of President Donald Trump’s far-reaching agenda for the IRS. The administration is preparing budget cuts and further layoffs that could ultimately force the IRS to shed as much as half of its 100,000-person workforce — a drastic reduction that could mean many Americans face less scrutiny, and receive less help, on their taxes. At the same time, Trump is asserting more political control over an agency that has historically been insulated from changes in leadership at the White House.

Soon after the election, Trump chose Billy Long, a former Republican member of Congress and vocal supporter of the president, to lead the IRS. The choice of Long was unusual. He’d never run a large organization and his only background in tax consisted of pitching small businesses on a fraud-riddled tax credit. And by deciding to replace Daniel Werfel, then the head of IRS, years before the end of his term in 2027, Trump was upending the norm that commissioners of the IRS stay in the role even as a new president comes into office.

Musk, who claimed to hold the record for the largest tax bill for an individual after having paid more than $11 billion to the IRS in 2021, has dispatched technologists to the agency with the goal of automating many of its functions. The presence of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is growing at the IRS, where Musk’s allies are preparing to cancel scores of contracts with outside technology vendors.

And with homeland security officials asking the IRS to help with deporting immigrants, some agency officials and tax experts also worry that the Trump administration could try to use vast stores of taxpayer information to execute political goals.

This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former IRS officials, aides on Capitol Hill and others in Washington who closely follow the tax agency. They described deep uncertainty as the IRS cycled through three leaders in a matter of weeks and Trump’s team moved to rapidly remake one of the government’s most fundamental agencies.

An IRS spokesperson declined to comment. A Treasury spokesperson said the Trump administration was exploring different options for streamlining the IRS.

“While no plan has been approved to date, modernization is necessary to keep up with the process by which Americans file their taxes, including the reality that over 90% of individual tax returns are filed electronically,” the spokesperson said. “These changes are aimed at improving taxpayer customer service and ensuring a smooth and successful filing season.”

‘Uncharted situation’

Even with his successor picked, Werfel, a Biden administration appointee, had wanted to stay in his job for as long as possible.

While the generational overhaul of the IRS he was hired to lead was now under threat by Trump, Werfel thought he might still be able to stay on for the first few months of the new administration. Long’s Senate confirmation would take time, and Werfel wanted to help the IRS get through filing season, its most high-stakes period when millions of Americans file returns.

Throughout the transition, Werfel repeatedly asked members of incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s staff whether they would want him to keep working. But Bessent and his staff never asked Werfel to stay — nor did they explicitly tell him to go — so he decided he would resign, hoping to avoid drawing any additional attention to the IRS, already a target for Republicans.

“This situation would have been somewhat uncharted,” Werfel said in an interview before he stepped down on Jan. 20. “I wasn’t able to predict what this uncharted situation would entail, and all of this would be happening while the IRS has some important obligations in the medium term.”

As the agency responsible for taking money from Americans to fund the government, the IRS has long been unpopular with the public. In that sense, it was a natural target for an anti-government crusade, even if it could mean bringing in less tax revenue. Musk, Long and members of Trump’s staff have even raised the possibility of abolishing the IRS altogether.

‘There really aren’t a lot of people there’

Caryn Burns had long been frustrated with the IRS. It took too long to get a call back, and the IRS staff she dealt with over the course of her career as an accountant could be underwhelming. But when she started working there herself in September, she started to get a sense of why the agency so often seemed to fall short.

The technology was archaic and took to weeks to learn to use. And while the workforce was growing rapidly under the Biden administration — with the number of employees rising by 20,000 over three years — Burns said the IRS still seemed short of staff.

“They couldn’t hire people quick enough to start making the necessary changes,” she said. “Once I learned all of this and once I started and I had access to all these programs, I realized this isn’t what I thought it was. There really aren’t a lot of people there.”

Burns, 58, had also worked in the large business and international division, in the Phoenix area, before she was laid off last month. She said she was close to completing an audit that would have generated a significant tax payment to the IRS. She’s not sure if her former colleagues will have the resources to finish it after the layoffs.

“I voted for Trump; I do like Trump,” she said. “I like what he did the last term in office and all of the things he stood for.”

“But now that he’s brought in Elon Musk,” it’s a mess, she said.