President Donald Trump's administration targeted bank regulators, rocket scientists and tax enforcers on Tuesday as it sought to fire thousands more federal employees in an unprecedented assault on the U.S. civil service.
With tax-filing season underway, senior officials at the Internal Revenue Service identified 7,500 employees for dismissal, with possibly more on the chopping block, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has swept through federal agencies slashing thousands of jobs since President Donald Trump became president last month and put Musk in charge of a drastic overhaul of government.
The White House has not said how many people it plans to fire and has given no numbers on the mass layoffs so far. The information to date has come from employees of federal agencies.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which oversees banks, said it has fired an unknown number of new hires, according to an email seen by Reuters. The cuts could potentially worsen staffing problems at a 6,000-person agency where more than one in three workers are eligible for retirement.
Roughly 1,000 new hires, including rocket scientists, at NASA were expected to be laid off on Tuesday as well, according to two people familiar with the U.S. space agency's plans, with more cuts possible.
"People are scared and not speaking up to voice dissent or disagreement," said one employee at the 18,000-person agency who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Layoffs were also expected at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which handles flood insurance and disaster response, as well as its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, sources said.
The Trump administration plans to fire hundreds of senior Department of Homeland Security employees this week, according to an administration official and a second source familiar with the matter. The planned firings, first reported by NBC News, would target people viewed as not aligned with Trump, the sources said.
Among the workers swept up in the overhaul of dozens of agencies are those reviewing Musk's brain implant company Neuralink and others monitoring an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu that has infected millions of chickens and cattle this year.
Musk's team has said it has saved $55 billion so far, a relatively small slice of the annual $6.7 trillion federal budget. The DOGE website has begun giving more details of government contracts it has canceled after widespread complaints that its work was not transparent.
The cost-cutting drive has focused largely on probationary employees hired within the past year who lack full employment protections.
At the IRS, that includes 7,500 involved in tax enforcement and compliance, but not those deemed essential for the April tax filing season, according to a person familiar with the matter. The tax-collecting agency could be asked to trim its 100,000-strong workforce further, the source said.
Republicans had objected to an IRS staff expansion undertaken by Democratic President Joe Biden that independent budget analysts said would boost tax collections and help close the persistent U.S. budget gap.
The overhaul comes as Trump attempts to exert even tighter control over the Justice Department, an agency traditionally seen as independent of White House influence.
Several department officials resigned last week after refusing a directive from a Trump appointee to drop a corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Another top prosecutor, Denise Cheung, resigned on Tuesday after refusing to investigate a government contract awarded during Biden's tenure.
The acting head of the Social Security Administration, Michelle King, resigned over the weekend after Musk's team asked for access to a vast database of personal and financial data at the agency, which handles retirement and other safety-net programs, according to a person familiar with the matter.
With opposition Democrats out of power in Congress, opponents have relied on the courts to stop the downsizing effort, with mixed success so far.
A federal judge in Washington on Tuesday declined to prevent Musk's team from accessing student-loan records at the Department of Education, saying a student group had failed to show they would misuse sensitive financial information.
Another judge is expected to rule on Tuesday on a request by Democratic attorneys general from 13 states to block Musk's personnel from reviewing sensitive records at several other agencies.
© Thomson Reuters 2025.
22 Comments
plasticmonkey
Making it easier for the uber wealthy to cheat.
That’s the intent.
I'veSeenFootage
Who needs tax enforcers and bank regulators?! Nobody! No wait, the country and its citizens need them. But the rich elite don't! And this is obviously and administration working for the rich elite and nobody else.
TaiwanIsNotChina
Of course, we can't have anyone preventing the geniuses in charge from doing their thing.
stormcrow
“One Hundred and One Ways to Gut America”
by Elon Musk & Donald J. Trump
Peter Neil
nothing like less than 1% of the budget to really make a difference.
stopping the $3.7 trillion of tax breaks for the top 0.1% in trump’s budget would be better. but hey, musk and trump know that americans aren’t too good at math.
bass4funk
This is great. Seems like we are already on our way to saving $50 billion, this is a start and this is so exciting, they need to cut and slash way more.
plasticmonkey
Nothing corrupt there . . .
Nothing reckless here . . .
lol
I'veSeenFootage
This is an honest question: can you explain why you're convinced America needs less tax enforcers (even thought tax cheats cost the US about 1 trillion dollars a year) and less bank regulators (even though banks are provably responsible for the biggest financial crisis in modern history)?
bass4funk
What do libs think expanding the size of the Federal government is a great thing? This is the hill the left want to sing their swan song??
They have the raw data, they can see where most of this waste is coming from, so follow the crumbs, you can do that without hundreds of government paid tax enforcers
I'veSeenFootage
I'm not a "lib". And who said anything about expanding anything? We're just talking about firing hundreds of workers.
So you think that collecting and analyzing thie "raw data" of close to 260 million adults and then following those "crumbs" can be quickly and efficiently done by... a few dozen people? You honestly think that's humanly possible?
lincolnman
Destroying the checks and balances that keeps felons like him from further raping, plundering, and pillaging the government coffers...our tax money....
Trump is not only hustling and fleecing his flock, he now plans to hustle and fleece the whole country...
Bob Fosse
Imagine how much money the US would have if Tesla paid federal income tax.
GBR48
Interference in some decades-long NASA programmes would be a crime against science. Hopefully other space agencies can step in.
The immediate effect of all this will be that Americans seeking any form of contact with the government will be hanging on the phone for a long time, or fobbed off with some fifth rate chat bot.
It would be interesting to get some feedback as to what ordinary Americans think about these wrecking ball tactics. They won't be getting any tax reductions out of it, but the tariffs (which are new taxes) are going to raise prices across the board. The government contracts that are being ended when staff are fired will be costing Americans money.
Bob Fosse
I posted a single factual sentence. If there was an emotional rant it was your reply.
BorisM
Do you even know what you're talking about? Tesla is a corporation, so it pays corporate tax on its profits. Income tax is what individuals pay. And if a corporation isn't making a profit, it won't pay corporate tax (notwithstanding all the loopholes available to make a company look unprofitable when it is).
Bob Fosse
It doesn’t.
wallace
Tesla is legally obligated to pay corporate taxes on its profits, but recent reports show that despite significant profits, Tesla has managed to pay very little to no federal income tax due to various tax loopholes and strategies, effectively lowering their tax rate significantly below the standard corporate tax rate.
BorisM
This is true of pretty much any corporation, and is the result of lobbyists and the crooked politicians they. own getting the tax laws written to allow this to happen. The only way to stop it is to completely overhaul and simplify the tax system to close the loopholes. I don't see any government - Trump's or otherwise - doing that. Sure, they might tinker around the edges to give the general public the illusion that they're "doing something", but little of substance will happen
plasticmonkey
That is a childishly naive understanding of how government works.
These tax agents weren’t sacked in order to save the government money. In fact, it will lose the government money. Because the super rich tax cheats will have more for themselves. That is why Trump is cutting the IRS. It has nothing to do with efficiency.
Waiting to hear a defense of billionaire tax cheats as being the “job creators”, and the real cheats being the IRS.
Peter Neil
but the citizens united ruling says corporations are like people.
the hypocrisy is numbing.
BorisM
Some people here clearly don't understand the difference between personal income tax and corporate tax.
wallace
You left out Capital Gains Tax which the super-rich pay instead of income tax at much higher rates.