You might have to wait for your tax refund this year, thanks to Trump
President Donald Trump and his co-president, Elon Musk, are planning to fire 6,000 employees at the Internal Revenue Service on Thursday, which tax experts say could delay Americans’ tax return payments and lead the government to lose out on tax revenue.
Richard Pon, a certified public accountant in San Francisco, told USA Today that firing thousands of IRS employees in the middle of filing season could cause tax return payment times to “double, triple, or quadruple.” As it stands, the average time it takes to receive a return is 21 days for taxpayers who file electronically and six to eight weeks for those file by paper, so these firings could delay tax returns by months.
Pon added that with fewer employees, Americans will also face longer wait times to contact the IRS with problems with their tax filings, making it more difficult to obtain the help needed to file returns.
“Normally they also have a Saturday service center open in March or early April, but that will probably be eliminated,” Pon told USA Today.
What’s more, The New York Times reported that many of the jobs set to be cut are in tax enforcement, which surely means fewer tax cheats will be caught and the government could lose out on revenue—the opposite of the cost savings Trump and Musk promised they’d achieve with Musk’s advisory commission, known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
“The expenses of operating the U.S. don’t disappear if the IRS suffers,” former IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig wrote in a post on LinkedIn.
“IRS compliance activities are necessary to our system of voluntary self-assessment,” Rettig added. “An underfunded IRS significantly benefits unidentified, noncompliant taxpayers at the direct expense of compliant taxpayers.”
Trump and the GOP have long wanted to decimate the IRS.
In December, Trump nominated a new commissioner of the tax-collecting service who wants to abolish the IRS altogether. And newly minted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Wednesday night in an appearance on Fox News that Trump wants to abolish the IRS and replace it with an “External Revenue Service“—which would collect tariffs.
“His goal is very simple. … His goal is to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay,” Lutnick said, misunderstanding that it is not foreign governments who pay tariffs but rather the U.S. companies importing the foreign goods.
But experts say that there is no universe in which the government can function on tariff revenue alone.
“It is literally impossible for tariffs to fully replace income taxes,” the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan think tank, wrote in a June 2024 report. “Tariff rates would have to be implausibly high on such a small base of imports to replace the income tax, and as tax rates rose, the base itself would shrink as imports fall, making Trump’s $2 trillion goal unattainable.”
Democrats are slamming Trump and Musk’s plan to decimate the IRS workforce.
“In the smack middle of filing season, the richest man in the world and his unqualified Muskateers are gearing up to gut the agency tasked with processing your returns, getting you a timely and fair refund, and making sure billionaires pay what they owe,” Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee said in a Thursday post on X. “Rigged BS.”