The IRS is falling apart, a new report from Mother Jones said on Tuesday. Reporter Stephanie Mencimer writes that she received a notice from the Internal Revenue Service claiming she underpaid her 2025 taxes, even though the agency had not credited payments she had already made. After two hours on hold, she gave up. A few days later, a recorded message about “high call volume” disconnected her. Her accountant said even dedicated lines for tax practitioners were not working, leaving serious issues unresolved with “no contact available at all.”Mencimer said she “realized that the IRS was finally imploding.”It's what everyone warned would happen when Elon Musk used his DOGE program to reduce the IRS by 25,000 people. It was about one-third of the entire IRS. “When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership,” former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said when speaking to Mother Jones reporter Michael Mechanic in April 2025. “You really are disabling the IRS.”Frank Bisignano, a former finance executive whom Trump named to a newly created “IRS CEO” role while also overseeing the Social Security Administration, had boasted in April that the cuts would not hurt operations. But Mencimer writes that her experience, along with IRS data and accounts from other taxpayers and professionals, suggests otherwise.“You can’t get rid of 30 percent of your staff and expect to be functional,” said Traci DiMartini, a former IRS human capital officer who was laid off last year. “Things are starting to break.”Members of Congress are now echoing those concerns. Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement, “The Administration laid off close to a third of the IRS workforce, sabotaging its mission, and making it impossible to get someone on the phone to answer even the simplest of questions, let alone resolve issues. Yet this Administration refuses to acknowledge the predictable consequences of gutting an agency and keeps telling taxpayers not to believe what they are experiencing.”The decline follows years of Republican efforts to shrink the IRS. When the Biden administration took office, Democrats directed new funding to the agency to pursue wealthy tax dodgers and improve customer service. By the end of that term, the IRS had collected about $1.3 billion in unpaid taxes from high-income filers and had hired more customer-service staff — the very people Mencimer could not reach.Under Biden, IRS call performance improved: in 2024, the agency answered more than 1 million additional calls during filing season than the year before and cut the average hold time from 28 minutes to 3 minutes, according to IRS data. Those gains have largely disappeared under Trump.“It’s infinitely worse in 2026 than it was in 2025,” New Jersey tax attorney Richard Champion told Mother Jones. He represents low-income taxpayers in tax court and says he now has at least four or five cases where he is “just stymied” because he cannot get through by phone.Experts across the board report the same problem: taxpayers cannot reach a live person, much less get help setting up payment plans. Wait times now average about 45 minutes, and many calls are disconnected.The nonprofit Center for Taxpayer Rights (CTR) conducted its own testing this year and found that government measurements showed IRS phone wait times increased more than 70 percent in 2026, even though the agency received 50 percent fewer calls on its main 1040 help line than the previous year. CTR testers found that nearly 40 percent of calls to various IRS numbers were disconnected.Online access has also deteriorated. When Mencimer logged into her IRS account, she repeatedly saw a message: “Account features limited due to partial outage. While you can still access your account, some features are unavailable, including account balance and payment history.” She checked for a month and never could view her details.Biden’s administration had allocated funds to modernize IRS IT systems, but Trump cut the IT office by 40 percent. The Taxpayer Advocate Service, which helps people navigate the bureaucracy, was also reduced.Mencimer’s next step was to contact her congresswoman, but as a D.C. resident without a voting member of Congress, she assumed no one would intervene. Her last resort was snail mail. But the IRS mailroom has been hit as hard as IT.“According to a recent report by the Taxpayer Advocate, the number of unprocessed correspondence and amended returns languishing at the IRS jumped from 3.8 million in 2025 to 7 million this year,” Mencimer wrote. “And that was before all the people like you were sending in letters,” said CTR’s Nina Olson.Despite the deteriorating service, the Treasury Department said about 8,000 new hires could be added through September — a small fraction of the tens of thousands of positions eliminated.