Thousands of Kansas City IRS workers brace for layoffs amid Trump administration purge

Hundreds of IRS employees in Kansas City are expecting layoff notices. (Suzanne King/The Beacon)

On a day when dangerously cold weather forced the Internal Revenue Service to close its downtown processing center, hundreds of probationary employees are on notice that their jobs are likely going away.

Following days of uncertainty for Kansas City’s federal workforce, IRS employees learned in a Feb. 18 video message that their jobs would be among the first on President Donald Trump’s chopping block.

One worker, who is about six months away from being out of her probationary period, said she would sit at home today not knowing her fate. She doesn’t have access to email remotely. If she’s laid off, as she expects, she’ll be back to unemployment and unsure how she’ll pay the bills.

Like other federal employees, the worker, who asked to remain anonymous, has known this day was coming. But she doesn’t believe most people realize the human toll these IRS layoffs will have.

“What really worries me for myself, but really for everyone else, too,” she said, “is that we are headed into an explosion of poverty. People are going to think we have all these resources. And, sure, there’s some group that will help you pay your rent. Maybe your utilities.”

But she worries that under the new federal regime, government safety net programs will evaporate.

“We don’t even know if we’d be able to get unemployment,” she said. “People think we have these resources, but we don’t.”

Shannon Ellis, president of Chapter 66 of the National Treasury Employees Union, warned in a recorded message Tuesday that probationary IRS employees would be laid off the next day, “not based on anything other than the date they were hired.”

Once weather conditions forced the government agency to declare a snow day Wednesday, Ellis asked employees in a second video message to contact the union if they received a layoff notice by email.

Daniel Scharpenburg, NTEU Chapter 66 first vice president, said the IRS employs nearly 6,000 people in Kansas City, including people hired for the tax season. About 1,000 of the Kansas City employees are in a probationary period of one or two years, depending on the position. Ellis said the union expected all probationary employees to be cut.

On Tuesday, Ellis urged every Kansas City IRS employee — whether they were in a probationary period or not — to gather important paperwork like pay stubs and job performance reviews, and be ready to vacate their desks within an hour of being notified of their dismissal.

“We don’t know what time,” she said. “We don’t know how it’s going to happen. We don’t even know if it includes all of our probationary employees.”

Ellis acknowledged that the IRS layoffs at the Kansas City service center in the middle of tax season would cause an inevitable disruption in tax return  — and refund — processing.

“We know the public will be impacted,” she said.

Calls to the IRS media line were not answered.

And the IRS layoffs are unlikely to be the only ones that will affect Kansas City’s federal workforce. The federal government is the city’s largest employer, with almost 30,000 employees across a range of government agencies.

Since the Truman administration, the federal government has played a major role in the area’s economy. Kansas City has been home to numerous outposts for federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the General Services Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the IRS.

The city scored the IRS service center — one of only a handful in the country — in 2006, after political leaders put together a tax-supported development to renovate Kansas City’s former main U.S. Post Office and add an adjacent office building and parking structure. The deal, which also involved renovations to Union Station across the street, saved IRS jobs for the area by consolidating seven local IRS offices into the facility at 333 W. Pershing Road.

The IRS center has employed as many as 8,000 full-time and seasonal employees over the years. But growth in electronic tax filings, which require fewer employees to process, led to previous layoffs across the agency’s U.S. workforce.

Since Trump took office for a second time, federal workers across Kansas City have been bracing for layoffs. Many received an email on Jan. 28, now famously known as the “Fork in the Road” email, offering them a “deferred resignation.”

Across the country, 75,000 federal workers reportedly accepted the offer, which heavily resembled one that tech billionaire, and now Trump influencer, Elon Musk sent Twitter employees after buying the social media company in 2022. The email promised to pay employees through the end of September if they resigned immediately.

The offer came with legal uncertainty and has been the subject of lawsuits, along with other Trump administration actions aimed at trimming the federal payroll.

The National Treasury Employees Union is one of five federal employee unions that are suing to stop the mass firings across the government. And a group of probationary employees who have been fired are asking the Office of Special Counsel to stop the mass layoffs.

In addition to firings already undertaken, the administration has reinstituted a policy making it easier to fire federal employees, ordered remote workers to return to the office and placed most agencies under a hiring freeze.

In a statement issued after a Feb. 13 listening session with federal workers, U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Kansas City, said “it’s more important than ever to stand up for those who dedicate their careers to public service.”

“Civil servants are the backbone of our democracy,” Cleaver said in the statement. “They keep our communities safe, our economy strong, and our government accountable.”

Economists said any significant reduction in federal jobs will affect Kansas City’s economy.

Frank Lenk, director of economic research at the Mid-America Regional Council, has said that each federal job and the income it creates fuels another job in the region. That means if 3,000 federal jobs permanently went away, the region’s economy could lose about twice as many workers overall.

A spokesperson for Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said in a statement about the IRS layoffs that the mayor would “advocate actively with our federal delegation to protect the positions of affected employees, who are valued members of our community.”

The union is inviting federal workers and supporters to a rally at Union Station on March 15, the day after a continuing resolution currently funding the federal government will expire.

“Come show your support for federal workers,” Ellis said. “And if there’s a government shutdown at that time, we will also be addressing that.”

This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.