With less than two weeks until the April 15 tax filing deadline in the U.S., the Internal Revenue Service has been ordered to hire back probationary employees, according to reports.
Bloomberg said that a court ordered the IRS to rehire approximately 7,000 employees put on administrative leave. These workers are still on the federal payroll, but they aren’t back at work, said the outlet.
“A notice to probationary employees – fired in February and reinstated in March – directed workers at the U.S. tax collector to prepare to return to ‘full duty’ by April 14 – one day before the country’s taxes are due,” it added, citing a copy of the notice.
Thousands of probationary employees were set to be let go in February. That month, Judge William H. Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted a temporary restraining order against the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and its Acting Director, Charles Ezell regarding the firings.
This Thursday, Howe on the Court reported that a group of nonprofits are also challenging layoffs of thousands of probationary employees urged the Supreme Court to leave Alsup’s order in place. It would reinstate more than 16,000 employees who were fired by six agencies in February.
“It strains credulity that returning employees to work would cause irreparable harm to the Government,” the group said in a 40-page filing cited by Howe, “when these employees had the same workplaces, credentials, benefits, and training just a few weeks ago.”
Howe noted that the term “probationary employees” refers to both people who are new to the federal government or the workforce and to experienced federal employees who transfer to a new role. These workers were fired as part of plans from President Donald Trump’s administration to cut government spending and reduce government staffing levels.
In addition to being met with lawsuits over the firings, the Trump administration has faced other challenges due to its efforts to cut staff. For example, the United States Department of Agriculture said back in February that it accidentally fired “several” employees who were working on the H5N1 avian flu outbreak and that it was looking to hire them back.
Last month, Scott Roecker, vice president of the nuclear materials security program at the Nuclear Threat Initiative nonprofit organization, also told Audacy that experts are concerned about cuts in the nuclear sector. He said that more than 130 of around 2,000 employees in the nuclear field have accepted an opportunity to leave the government and get paid through the end of the year as of March 18.
“These are, for the most part, people who are in leadership positions with several decades of experience on very important and unique, you know, missions for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA),” Roecker explained. He confirmed that there are no plans to replace the employees, who worked at offices across the nation.
According to Bloomberg, “workers will be picking up new federal ID badges, powering up computers they turned in when the terminations hit in February and negotiating remote work arrangements in cities where the IRS doesn’t have office space,” until the April 15 tax deadline.
Those who don’t want to come back can send an email declining to return that also serves as a resignation from the agency, the outlet said. People who took new jobs since the Elon Musk-headed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiated the firings can keep those jobs too, Bloomberg added. DOGE has remained busy, Audacy reported this week that DOGE-initiated cuts accounted for almost 80% of more than 275,000 layoffs announced last month.
“Still, the Trump administration’s longterm goal of cutting the IRS workforce in half is expected to dramatically raise wait times for customer service functions, including helping individual filers with tax returns,” the outlet reported. “It’s also likely to be good news for tax cheats, tax experts said, since it will cramp the agency’s ability to audit returns, including of some of the wealthiest people in the country.”