IRS audits collected $3.5 billion less in fiscal 2025 as the agency shed thousands of auditors and other agency staffers.
Page B2From§Eachthe noon edition — 1 September 2026
IRS audit revenue plunges after mass layoffs; GOP hardliners now threaten rebellion over spending.
As it ran on the front
IRS Audit Enforcement, a function of the federal government dating to the agency's earliest years, died this summer following mass layoffs, the watchdog's report confirms, of complications from staffing reductions it did not have the numbers to survive. It was not old. It was, by most measures, still doing its job right up until it wasn't, and then the revenue it used to bring in simply wasn't there, the way a whippersnapper who used to mow the whole block quietly stops showing up and nobody remarks on it until the grass is a foot high.
It is survived by the stopgap funding bill currently before the House, and by the GOP hardliners threatening to blow it up over spending — the same spending the deceased used to help account for. It is preceded in death by whatever oversight capacity got trimmed the round before this one, and the round before that; this has been a slow one, a case dressed up as a budget line.…
…(cont) The cause of death, per the watchdog, was mass layoffs. That is not a euphemism. That is the finding. The agency lost staff, the staff used to run audits, the audits used to bring in revenue, and the revenue is now, per the same report, plunged. It is a short sentence and it holds together, which is more than can be said for the caucus currently threatening a rebellion over spending they helped make harder to check.
There is a particular kind of malarkey in defunding the office that finds the money and then complaining, weeks later, that the money can't be found. It happens often enough that this obituary writer no longer bothers pretending to be surprised by it, which is its own kind of small institutional death, and, honestly, a bit of a shit way to run a filing system, said plainly and moved past.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that anyone in a position to vote on the stopgap funding bill read the watchdog's report before threatening to rebel over the parts of it they defunded first.
“They gutted the enforcement, watched the collections dry up, and now the same crowd's threatening to shut down the government over spending they made harder to police in the first place. That's not fiscal discipline, that's arson with a budget hearing scheduled for after the fire. Somebody's not getting audited, and it isn't the guy clipping coupons.”
“Staffing reductions at the IRS were about efficiency, streamlining, doing more with less — the audit revenue dip is a transition cost, temporary, nothing structural. As for the funding rebellion, that's a separate caucus entirely, not related to the — well, they're both fiscal conservatives, so I suppose it is related, but not in the way that makes it look bad, which — I need to move on from this sentence.”
The receipts
A small group of conservatives in the House of Representatives are threatening to vote against a procedural rule and stymie much of the GOP agenda for the week to protest a Senate-passed government funding bill the lower chamber is set to take up Tuesday. The hardliners likely can't block the funding bill itself, which is...
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.