Billy Long Confirmed to Lead IRS as Staffing Cuts Complicate Modernization Plans

The IRS has a new permanent commissioner, as the Senate confirmed former Missouri Republican Congressman Billy Long to the position. 

Long was confirmed on a 53-44 vote, overcoming Democrats’ opposition. While in Congress, Long sponsored a bill to get rid of the IRS. He also worked for a firm that pitched a pandemic-era tax break that was riddled with fraud. 

Long takes over an agency in transition and counting interim heads, is the sixth leader of the IRS this year. 

Staffing Plans Impact Modernization Goals

One of the major challenges will be figuring out the staffing situation at the agency and how that impacts the agency’s plans to modernize. About 20 percent of the IRS workforce left since President Trump took office, many of them on deferred resignations or early retirements.

And if layoffs resume and all those who signed up for the delayed resignation offer are approved, the IRS workforce could fall below 60,000 employees, a 40 percent reduction from the last days of the Biden Administration. 

Among those exiting are about 2,000 IT employees or about 25 percent of the IRS’s overall tech workforce. That includes the agency’s tech leadership like former Chief Information Officer (CIO) Rajiv Uppal and acting CIOs Darnita Trower and Eric Markow, who left a few months ago.

Also exiting in large numbers are revenue agents, the IRS workers who perform audits. About 3,600 auditors, or 31 percent of the audit workforce, have taken deferred resignation or were let go in the first three months of 2025. 

Still, former IRS Acting Commissioner and Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender said modernization is on an accelerated timeline even with the staffing changes.  

“We are working to complete the vast majority of our modernization efforts in the next two-to-three years,” said Deputy Secretary Faulkender at a recent Tax Policy Center event. 

But rank and file employees see it differently. 

One current employee told NextGov/FCW that modernization projects will take longer because of the talent drain. “Systems break and it takes days to fix them because no one is left who knows how,” said the employee. “Everyone is gone.”

And new analysis from the Center for American Progress states that the “medium- to long-run costs of halving the IRS workforce would far outweigh the savings from staffing cuts” with “no rigorous evidence suggesting that the consequences of significantly reducing the IRS workforce by such an extreme amount would result in deficit reduction.”

But the Trump Administration insists that’s not the case. 

“The roll back of wasteful Biden-era hiring surges, and consolidation of critical support functions are vital to improve both efficiency and quality of service,” said a Treasury Department spokesperson.