The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has furloughed nearly half of its workforce — about 34,000 employees — as the federal government shutdown enters another week. According to CNBC, fewer than 40,000 IRS workers remain on the job, leaving most agency operations effectively closed.
The furloughs took effect Wednesday, just one week before the October 15 filing deadline for taxpayers who received extensions to submit their 2024 returns. With so many employees sent home, uncertainty looms over how the agency will handle incoming tax forms, payments, and refunds.
“Tax returns will be arriving, but there will be no one there to process them,” said Maria Ramos, president of the National Treasury Employees Union’s (NTEU) Austin, Texas, chapter, in an interview with CNN.
Union leaders say taxpayers should brace for serious disruptions, including extended call wait times, dropped calls, and longer delays in processing both payments and refunds. “Everything will slow down,” said Gibson Jones, president of the NTEU’s Memphis chapter. “It’s simply a matter of not having enough people to do the work.”
Shannon Ellis, who heads the union’s Kansas City chapter, said the furlough announcement created confusion among staff. Many of the employees now on unpaid leave had been classified as essential during previous shutdowns. “People don’t understand the logic,” Ellis said. “The IRS hasn’t explained how they decided who’s essential and who isn’t.”
In an internal memo, David Traynor, the acting human capital officer for the IRS, informed employees that furloughed workers would be placed in “non-pay, non-duty status.” He instructed them to stay away from their workplaces and reminded them that, by law, they are prohibited from performing any work — even voluntarily — during the shutdown.
The furloughs add to a series of cuts that have steadily reduced the IRS workforce over the past year. The agency began 2025 with roughly 100,000 employees and now stands at about 74,000, following months of attrition through resignations and layoffs.
“We were already short-staffed after months of resignations and layoffs,” Ellis said. “Now this.”
The combination of workforce reductions and the current furloughs leaves the IRS in one of its weakest operational states in decades, just as it faces one of the busiest periods of the tax year. Analysts warn that if the shutdown continues, taxpayers could see serious backlogs that take months — or even years — to clear.
