The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has fired over 6,000 employees, just months before Americans file their annual taxes.

According to the Washington Examiner, most of those who were laid off were “probationary” workers who had served for less than two years. This accounts for about 7% of the agency’s total workforce, which consists of roughly 100,000 employees. Most of the laid-off workers were located outside of Washington D.C., and were instead in states such as Florida, Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas.

Kevin Hassett, Director of the President’s National Economic Council (NEC), defended the firings, saying that “there are more than 100,000 people working to collect taxes, and not all of them are fully occupied.”

The labor union representing IRS employees, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), has already tried to file a legal challenge to block the layoffs, but their lawsuit was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, who argued that such a case should be brought before the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) rather than a federal court.

The IRS layoffs are just the latest in an ongoing series of actions taken by President Donald Trump, along with Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to drastically reduce the size of the federal government. Thousands of employees have been fired across numerous agencies, with certain agencies being targeted for total elimination, including the Department of Education and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

On Wednesday, newly-confirmed Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick admitted in an interview that President Trump is seeking to eventually abolish the IRS altogether. The president has repeatedly insisted that the revenue generated by taxes on U.S. citizens could easily be replaced, and even surpassed, by the revenue generated from tariffs on foreign goods. To this end, President Trump has enacted tariffs on Canada and Mexico regarding their inadequate handling of security at America’s northern and southern borders, and has also announced tariffs on goods from countries that engage in deceitful and manipulative trade practices, including China and the European Union.