IRS plans to cut thousands of workers by mail

Thousands of IRS employees around the country reported to work Thursday prepared for an email announcement that they were being placed on leave.

For many, the email never arrived. Not because they weren’t being terminated — they were — but because of a technical glitch that prevented officials from notifying them via email, according to an agency employee and messages reviewed by Bloomberg News.

The agency has resorted to paper: “All terminated employees, whether they received the email or not, will be receiving a paper copy of the letter via UPS overnight tracked mail,” an internal message said, referring to United Parcel Service Inc. 

The IRS didn’t respond to a request for comment. The agency is planning to terminate about 6,700 probationary workers, a category that includes new hires as well as people recently promoted or reassigned, as billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency project enacts sweeping job cuts across the federal workforce. 

Replacing email termination with overnight letter delivery added a potentially ironic wrinkle to the IRS job cuts: additional costs. Full details weren’t available Friday, but overnight letter delivery from UPS can cost more than $30 between adjacent areas, according to published rate schedules.

Spread across the roughly 6,700 employees scheduled to be terminated this week, the inability to deliver the bad news electronically could mean more than $200,000 in postage.

Cutting thousands of federal workers all at once has proved harder than anticipated for DOGE and the Trump administration. Last week, officials at the Small Business Administration sent termination notices to probationary staff, then told them the messages had been sent by mistake. The next day, SBA told the workers they had been fired after all. 

The Department of Energy laid off nuclear bomb specialists, only to reverse course and call them back to work. The Department of Agriculture accidentally cut workers who are charged with containing a massive bird flu outbreak, NBC News and other outlets have reported.

There was no indication the IRS was having second thoughts about the cuts, only having trouble with last-minute paperwork.

A copy of the IRS termination notice reviewed by Bloomberg said the agency was abiding by an executive order to “terminate probationary employees who were not deemed as critical to filing season.” 

“We don’t have many details that we are permitted to share, but this is all tied to compliance with the executive order,” the message said.