Elon Musk’s destructive DOGE operation is setting its sights on the Internal Revenue Service, and things are already looking dicey. There are reports that sensitive taxpayer information could be misused, and that potential cuts to the IRS’s workforce could cause a headache for taxpayers this tax season — as well as serve as an unexpected gift to rich tax dodgers.
According to NBC News, an IRS employee affiliated with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is “expected to seek access” to the Integrated Data Retrieval System, which “contains information such as taxpayers’ individual master files, taxpayer identification numbers, retirement account information and details on pending adoptions.”
In addition to the odd and concerning intrusions into personal databases, the prospect of possible mass layoffs at the IRS is also bad news.
The Washington Post reported that “IDRS access is extremely limited — taxpayers who have had their information wrongfully disclosed or even inspected are entitled by law to monetary damages.” Citing three people familiar with internal agency deliberations at the IRS, the Post noted that “the request for DOGE access has raised deep concern within the IRS,” as it is “highly unusual to grant political appointees access to personal taxpayer data, or even programs adjacent to that data.”
Nina Olson, the former head of the IRS’s internal consumer watchdog, told the Post: “The information that the IRS has is incredibly personal. Someone with access to it could use it and make it public in a way, or do something with it, or share it with someone else who shares it with someone else, and your rights get violated.”
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields defended the access controversy by saying that “waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long” and “it takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.” But it’s not clear how a lone software engineer will do that, and it doesn’t address the breach of norms.
In addition to the odd and concerning intrusions into personal databases, the prospect of possible mass layoffs at the IRS is also bad news. Two sources familiar with the IRS’s plans told The Associated Press that the agency is expected to lay off thousands of probationary workers in the middle of tax season. Probationary status refers to how recently someone was hired for a new position, and across the federal government it typically takes one to two years for a worker for full civil protections to take effect for them.
Some accountants say that a personnel shortage could mean long wait times for taxpayers seeking help with their returns and significant delays for tax refund checks. The latter would be a particularly bad headache for people short on cash who are depending on a swift refund to manage their financial costs for the year. But there’s one set of people who would benefit from a shrunken IRS workforce: people who want to commit tax fraud. President Joe Biden fought to add tens of thousands of workers to the IRS in order to step up enforcement and crack down on tax cheats. While Republicans disingenuously sought to frame this as about targeting the middle class, the wealthy are the biggest beneficiaries of weaker enforcement. I wrote in 2023: As experts like Georgetown University’s Don Moynihan have pointed out, an understaffed IRS is of greatest benefit to the rich, whose finances are more complicated to evaluate, and who are more adept at finding loopholes. “The audit rate for individuals earning more than $1 million has been divided by 4 since 2010, feeding massive tax dodging,” he noted.
In other words, if there are significant layoffs of IRS workers, it will likely encourage unethical tax behavior — and make it harder for any such bad actors to get caught. Once again we’re seeing how DOGE is using the pretext of “efficiency” to lay waste to a functioning government. DOGE continues to aggressively seek access to sensitive information tied to payment systems and private taxpayer information across various departments without explaining why any of it is necessary for reform. And its rash and hurried mass layoffs are, by definition, not designed to make departments more productive. In the case of the IRS, Musk’s tampering is likely only to hurt ordinary Americans while ensuring his plutocrat pals have an easier time fleecing the public.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
