The Impact of IRS Cuts on Ogden: A Community in Transition
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Introduction to Ogden and Its IRS Presence
If you’ve ever lived west of the Mississippi, you’ve probably mailed a tax return to the IRS service center in Ogden, Utah. Inside a sprawling campus near the city’s historic downtown, workers process millions of tax returns a year, plus nonprofit paperwork and enforcement actions. Before President Donald Trump took office in January, the IRS offices in Ogden collectively employed about 7,500 people, making the city economy more reliant on the federal bureaucracy than on its famous powder skiing.
Everyone who lives in Ogden knows someone who works for the taxman. Husbands and wives, parents and children—IRS employment is often a family affair. But this Western outpost of the federal government lies deep within MAGA territory. Ogden City, home to 88,000 residents, about 30 percent of whom are Hispanic, makes up a small purple dot in the sprawling Northern Utah metro area that’s home to some 700,000 people. But about 60 percent of residents who reside in the greater Ogden area voted with the rest of the state last year, solidly for Trump.
Recent Federal Workforce Reductions
That support, however, did not spare the city’s largest employer. In February, Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency took a chainsaw to the civil service, immediately firing thousands of probationary workers, who had fewer job protections. Then Musk issued his "fork in the road" email, pushing other federal workers to quit as part of a “deferred resignation program,” lest they get fired later with no benefits. Those who took the “fork” were put on administrative leave and paid for not working through the end of September.
That attack on federal workers landed heavily on the IRS. By June 4, the agency had hemorrhaged more than a quarter of its national workforce—about 26,000 people. Union officials expected that about 20 percent of the IRS employees in Ogden—about 1,500—would no longer be there by the end of September. “What makes this so tough is the fact that most of these people have just a huge knowledge base,” said Robert Lawrence, president of the local chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union. “They’re gone now.”
Community Response and Personal Stories
I was born and raised in Ogden, and I wondered how a region so supportive of Trump would respond to the massive job losses he instigated for no good reason. So I went back to find out. I spoke with many current and now-former IRS employees, local activists and union reps, and politicians and residents to see how the cuts were affecting the local economy and the very fabric of the community. Had they shaken voters’ faith in their president? Have elected officials stepped up to protect their constituents? And what did it all mean for collecting the nation’s taxes?
Americans may hate the IRS, but in Ogden, it’s long been recognized as a great place to work. “It was like a little community,” said Kathie Darby, a local activist who retired from the IRS in 2014. The service center held fashion shows and had its own choir. It has a day care center and, Darby added, “a little store and a bank.” She still golfs in an IRS league created long before she got her first job in the mail room in 1983.
Many IRS workers I met also appreciated the diverse workforce and LGBTQ-friendly environment. Immigrants on staff introduced new dishes to office potlucks, and their presence meant that taxpayers could often reach someone who spoke their language when they needed help. The agency offered upward mobility for people without college degrees and provided accommodations often not found in the private sector—everything from ASL translators to “fragrance-free” areas—making the Ogden facility a desirable workplace for veterans and people with disabilities.
Charles Garn, 25, who started working in the mail room last December, told me that when he went through orientation, “one of the slides they had for introducing us all was like, ‘Trans people exist. Don’t bother them about the bathroom they’re using.’” He appreciated the sensitivity, as well as working on a team with four deaf people. And unlike many other employers in Utah, the IRS had a union supporting local workers. “That was amazing,” said a former employee, whom I’ll call Pat.
The Ogden employees’ view of the IRS bears no resemblance to the portrait painted by congressional Republicans, who have demonized the agency for decades and left it badly underfunded even before DOGE. In 2022, President Joe Biden tried to remedy the problem in his Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which gave the IRS about $80 billion to modernize and bolster its ability to pursue wealthy, sophisticated tax cheats.
But Republicans turned the new funding into a conspiracy theory, insisting Biden wanted to hire an army of armed agents to terrorize hardworking small-business owners and middle-class taxpayers. Former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel even suggested Democrats would “send the IRS ‘SWAT team’ after your kids’ lemonade stand.” Every member of the Utah delegation voted against the IRA, and the following year, Republicans in Congress clawed back $21 billion of the new IRS funding.
Political and Community Dynamics
What remained did allow the IRS to start filling empty jobs and bring fresh blood into the agency. Lots of these new hires had just started work when Trump was elected and were the first ones fired. A union representative said that in February of this year, at least 100 probationary workers at the Ogden IRS lost their jobs. That was only the beginning of the chaos. In March, the administration put the service center building up for sale; two weeks later, it backpedaled, and a federal judge ordered the IRS to bring back the probationary employees. In April, the Supreme Court stopped the order. Meanwhile, the Treasury Department began issuing mass reduction-in-force (RIF) notices as it moved to slash the entire IRS workforce by 40 percent.
In Ogden, the RIF notices went out every Friday, so workers spent the week stressing over whether they’d be next to go. “The tension’s so thick in there you don’t know who to look at,” one employee told me in April. “I feel like there will be people going off the rails.”
A federal judge halted the RIFs in May, after a coalition of labor unions filed a suit alleging the mass firings were illegal. In July, the Supreme Court said the Trump administration could continue dismantling the federal workforce. Meanwhile, the attrition at the Ogden IRS was well underway.
Dan Martinez, legislative director for the Treasury workers union there, said the administration also found other ways to push people out. The Ogden service center operated 24/7. In the past, people could work, say, four 10-hour days or a swing shift that ended at midnight. That all screeched to a halt. “They are taking away shifts, taking away people’s laptops so they can’t work from home,” a 20-year IRS veteran said. The administration also imposed a government-wide return-to-office mandate. With so many employees now in the office at the same time, they said, “There’s nowhere to sit.”
Many longtime employees started taking early retirement because they couldn’t manage the rigid 9-to-5 office schedule. One woman who cares for a disabled sibling took early retirement. “I’m just really mad,” she said. She’d worked for the IRS for more than 30 years and wanted to retire on her own terms.
Younger workers also started heading for the door. “Everybody’s burning through their leave now that they don’t feel like it’s a secure job,” Garn said. He’d hoped to pursue a career at the agency, but after the first round of firings, he took the deferred resignation deal—and was then required to keep working through tax season. “We were already understaffed,” he told me in April. But now, “people are disappearing.”
He worked through June 30, by which point his team of about 30 was down to seven or eight because so many people had quit. At one point, he said, a manager was handling eight teams of workers.
Union president Lawrence said DOGE may have been too successful in reducing workforce numbers. “We are probably going to be hiring,” he told me over the summer. “They need people to process taxes.” In its fiscal year 2026 budget request, the IRS told Congress that it would need to hire 11,159 full-time call center workers just to maintain the current level of service, but some former employees have heard rumors that the agency can’t hire back the people it fired. “This was clearly the case of putting the cart before the horse,” Lawrence said.
Community Sentiment and Political Climate
I hadn’t fully appreciated just how much the Ogden area I grew up in had thrown in for Trump until I was visiting in the summer of 2020. At the time, the president’s approval numbers were tumbling, thanks to his mishandling of the pandemic, but you wouldn’t have known it there.
I drove by my old house and discovered a truck flying a giant Trump flag in the driveway. Downtown, Brixton’s, famous for its baked potatoes, had draped its storefront with a big sign that read, “We [heart emoji] and support our President,” and called him “the Top-tater.” One of the restaurant’s then-owners had even created a “Trump-tater” mascot that showed up at local college basketball games.
Members of my own family have not resisted the MAGA siren song. My late 83-year-old aunt in Ogden, who spent eight years working at the IRS, loved Trump so much that she stuck it out in hospice care just long enough to see him reelected in November 2024. She died the day after the election. But as Trump’s second term began, Ogden’s MAGA mania smashed into reality when the administration targeted the city’s largest employer. “I saw several co-workers who were walked out, crying, saying, ‘How could he do this? I voted for him!’” Pat told me as we sat in a hipster cafe that was once a Greyhound bus terminal. She had started at the IRS when she was 26 and progressed to helping with audits in the small-business and self-employment division. She’d only been in her current position for 18 months when DOGE came in.
“We were already struggling to keep up with cases,” she explained, but when the mass firings started, “it just compounded.” Taxpayers would no longer be able to reach anyone for help with the business tax returns she handled. As a result, they risked owing a lot more money in interest and landing in tax court.
She had wanted to stay. “I loved it,” she recalled. “We’re going to try to help the community.” But she found that what she’d most enjoyed about working at the IRS was disappearing. People who needed accommodations for things like carpal tunnel syndrome couldn’t get them. Immigrants feared ICE would raid the building. Some managers were quitting, she says, because they couldn’t bear to lay everyone off. Others, like her own manager, were steadfast in their support of the president and would say, “I think he’s doing great. Go Trump!”
In March, Pat became one of three on a nine-person team who took the deferred resignation—three of the others, she said, wished they had. At least six of her family members still work at the IRS, and when I spoke with her in July, she said they were worried about the staffing shortages: “They don’t have enough people to get through all the work that there is. So many programs have been cut.”
Another IRS worker I met, whom I’ll call Peggy, was only about six months into her job when she got sacked. She’d worked there previously, left to get a master’s degree, and then, years later, was recruited to come back as a specialized auditor. When she was walked out of the building in February, the 10 audits she’d been working on “were all put in a box,” she told me in April. “Nobody has contacted those businesses, and they forbade me from contacting them.”
Peggy worked for a national division with no on-site supervisor. All her communications with the IRS came through video calls or mass emails, like the one informing her she’d been reinstated after a judge ordered the probationary workers rehired. But before she could retrieve her security badge or computer, an email appeared, putting her on administrative leave. And then, on short notice, another one informed her that everybody had to return to the office in person by April 14.
She called her supervisor, hoping to find out how to retrieve her access card and computer. “Her management position was dissolved because there weren’t enough employees to manage,” Peggy said. “And then I called the last manager I had before her; he had taken early retirement. I contacted his boss, same story.” Before she could reach anyone helpful, she received another email with the message: “Never mind. Don’t come back to work. You’re on administrative leave until we decide.”
She found little sympathy for her plight in Ogden. Local Facebook groups and news stories were full of comments about how taxation is theft and cheering the demise of the IRS. “I don’t talk about what I do publicly, because it’s dangerous,” Peggy told me. “I can’t even stand up and defend myself.” Many of her family members are Trump supporters. “They’re always shocked to talk to me,” she said, because they had believed DOGE cuts were focused on waste and fraud, not workers like her.
Peggy loved her job, but “after all this chaos,” she said, she’d decided to opt for the voluntary resignation program. But she missed the deadline to take the buyout offer because she never officially received it amid the mass cuts. When Musk and DOGE first issued the deferred resignation offer, it came with a not-so-veiled threat: Take this or we’ll just fire you later without severance. But instead of getting fired, Peggy was called back to work in May, and when I spoke with her in August, she was still there. But nothing was the same. “The system that was in place is in shambles,” she said, “and there are not enough people to do the necessary steps anymore. It’s crazy. We’re all just pretending like things are fine.”
Concluding Reflections and Broader Implications
There’s no evidence that all this cost-cutting is serving the greater good. In March, the Budget Lab at Yale estimated that a 50 percent cut to the IRS workforce could result in a net revenue loss of $350 billion over the next decade, and possibly more. “If the lack of IRS resources leads to a substantial increase in noncompliance,” it concluded, “net forgone revenue could rise by $2.4 trillion over 10 years.”
“If you take money away from the IRS, you lose multiples of whatever it is you think you’re saving,” former IRS chief John Koskinen previously told one of my colleagues. Eliminating jobs means fewer audits of the wealthy and sophisticated tax evasion, which can lead to increased tax cheating and revenue loss. “It’s a tax cut for tax cheats,” Koskinen said. “You encourage people not to file, because they’re not going to get caught.”
The full impact of the cuts remains to be seen, but community sentiment and political dynamics in Ogden reflect a complex mixture of support and concern. While some locals support Trump and see the layoffs as justified, others worry about the long-term implications for public services and local stability. The community’s response continues to evolve as the community navigates this challenging period.