Nobody is asking me, but there is one small step we can immediately take to replace some of the jobs we are losing to the DOGE layoffs, as well as the many others we are sure to lose to the tariffs. And until we take Canada, we can build some additional woodworking shops on the land we still have—and quickly hire a squadron of Geppettos.
Those of you who follow Glenn Kessler’s fact-checking for The Washington Post have watched as he awards a small batch of Pinocchios, one to five, to any and every politician whose nose has grown so large it has fallen off because they have lied so often. And if you have been paying attention, ever since he descended the escalator, Donald Trump has been accumulating far more than his fair share of Pinocchios. Now, of course, unlike an Oscar or Emmy or Grammy or even Best in Show, these are precisely the kind of award that no one wants to advertise. So, if you are looking, you can find smashed bits and pieces of Pinocchios in garbage bins and dumpsters pretty much anywhere you go in Washington, D.C.
If you have seen any of the White House press briefings or the recent Senate hearing on the fiasco of war plans against the Houthis being shared over a Signal text chat, you have a pretty good sense that we are are going to need a small wooden army of replacement Pinocchios for Glenn to give out.
Yes, so many lies, multiplied a thousand times since the administration’s love affair and surrender to Musk and his DOGE. Add all of the cabinet members, so very willing to cooperate, and Republican Congress members who can’t make it through a paragraph without hailing their king. Yes, they are earning ever more Pinocchios with each additional lie, each and every day.
But so much more than Pinocchios have been smashed. One by one our federal agencies have fallen into the greedy hands of Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Pretty much every department of our government, designed to serve us, has become the target of those determined to dismantle the institutions on which we the American public have relied.
I have written about how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is distorting the work of Health and Human Services. And there is the VA, EPA, and State and Defense Departments. But if you are committed to gaining as much power as you possibly can, if you are convinced that only you and those you favor really deserve as much wealth as you can gather, which institution would you want to control? How about the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS):
It doesn’t take someone like Elon Music who owns rocket scientists or Donald Trump and all his one percent donors to want to exercise control of the work the IRS does. Let’s start with the $4.7 trillion—and, of course, the power of the IRS to audit tax returns, and power over the IRS employees who exercise discretion when it comes time to decide which American have honestly reported their income and are actually paying what they owe.
Now it is no coincidence that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for how best to dismantle government as we know it includes a whole section on the IRS. They made clear their ideological purpose as they criticized the Biden administration:
Under the leadership of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the department has made ‘equity’ and ‘climate change’ among its top five priorities. The next Administration must act decisively to curtail activities that fall outside Treasury’s mandate and primary mission. Treasury must refocus on its core missions of promoting economic growth, prosperity, and economic stability.
It still boggles the mind how “equity” became a dirty word.
They continue:
For a clear statement of Treasury’s mission drift, one need look no further than Secretary Yellen’s introduction in the Treasury Department’s Fiscal Year 2022–2026 Strategic Plan:
We will have to address the structural problems that have plagued our economy for decades: the decline in labor force participation, income and racial inequality, and serious underinvestment in crucial public goods like childcare, education, and physical infrastructure. And then there are rising challenges, like climate change, which, left unchecked, will undermine every aspect of our economy from supply chains to the to the financial system.
For MAGA, the Biden/Yellen/Democratic agenda stressed politically questionable goals like promoting equity and public investment. Project 2025 makes clear the need to the replace this “woke” agenda with an emphasis on making it easier for the wealthy to keep their wealth and create more wealth:
The Treasury Department should develop and promote tax reform legislation that will promote prosperity … This, in turn, is accomplished primarily by reducing marginal tax rates, reducing the cost of capital and broadening the tax base to eliminate tax-induced economic distortions by eliminating special-interest tax credits, deductions, and exclusions. Tax compliance costs will decline precipitously if the tax system is substantially simplified …
[Emphasis added.]
And our tax and IRS policy should be redirected from supporting the public sector to the private:
First, the tax system should raise the revenue necessary to fund a limited government for constitutionally appropriate activities. It should raise this revenue such that it: (a) applies the least economically destructive forms of taxation; (b) has low tax rates on a broad, neutral tax base; (c) minimizes interference with the operation of the free market and free enterprise; and (d) minimizes the cost to taxpayers of compliance with and administration of the tax system.
This is why, to radically transform our priorities, the Trump administration, Elon Musk, and DOGE began a multi-pronged attack on our institutions. First, when it came to the Treasury, discover exactly who has the money and how much of that money is going to the government via federal taxation. And, of course, that information is accessed by those working at IRS. And their loyalty was suspect. So, President Trump began on January 20, 2025:
Trump’s executive order “Restoring Accountability To Policy-Influencing Positions Within The Federal Workforce” asserted the need and right to more effectively manage the federal workforce:
It didn’t take long to make “restoring accountability” real. Through the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), DOGE began to fire thousands of workers at the IRS:
On February 14, 2025, Reuters reported:
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is preparing to fire thousands of workers in the coming days, a move that could squeeze resources at the tax-collecting agency during the critical tax-filing season, two people familiar with the matter said. Officials from the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees federal hiring, ordered all agencies on Thursday to dismiss their probationary employees, workers who are newer to their positions and do not enjoy full job protections.
It was unclear how many thousands of employees would be fired at the IRS, whose workforce grew under the administration of former President Joe Biden to reach about 100,000 people, including roughly 16,000 probationary workers. Biden had sought to bolster the agency’s operations, including its ability to audit corporations and wealthy taxpayers. ‘The cuts will target all probationary employees who did not resign under a now-closed buyout program or who have not been identified as essential to get through tax season, which is in full swing ahead of the federal return filing deadline of April 15,’ one of the people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
[Emphasis added.]
The latest round of layoffs would terminate nearly 6,800 employees — on top of about 6,700 probationary employees who have already been fired and 4,700 employees who took the ‘voluntary buyout’ known as the ‘Fork in the Road’ program from the Trump administration. Probationary employees are hires who generally have been on the job for less than a year …
Echoing concerns sounded by experts and other employees, the source says these cuts could impact the amount of revenue the IRS brings in and that could ripple through the federal government as IRS funds nearly all government operations … ‘Depending upon how we effectuate these cuts, it could dramatically reduce revenue, dramatically reduce customer service,’ the source said, adding that the cuts could also impact voluntary tax compliance.
‘If we are not auditing much, it impacts people’s willingness to file honestly in the first place,’ the source said.
One current IRS employee, who spoke anonymously to CNN, said Thursday’s news about impending staff reductions made a difficult workplace environment even more challenging.
‘Morale is suffering … More and more of our workdays are taken up by questions, meetings, new issues coming down the pike and new directives from outside our agency. And really, all we want to do is do our jobs.’ The employee said the ‘everyday status quo’ within the tax-collection agency already features people crying, managers apologizing for the firings and chaos, and social media ‘in a frenzy.’ Like most IRS employees, this person is not based in Washington, DC, and they’re a leader in their local union representing IRS employees.
It didn’t take long for a broad coalition of several unions—like the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE); the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); and the United Nurses Association of California—and a variety of public interest groups to seek an injunction to stop and reverse the firings:
The plaintiffs filed:
… seeking to enjoin the terminations of tens of thousands of federal employees in contravention of federal constitutional and statutory law … On February 13, 2025, Defendant OPM and its newly appointed Acting Director, Defendant Charles Ezell, ordered federal agencies across the country to terminate tens of thousands of federal employees by sending them standardized notices of termination, drafted by OPM, that falsely state that the terminations are for performance reasons …
OPM’s directive that federal agencies terminate these employees en masse, on pretextual grounds, seeks to further the newly elected Presidential Administration’s policy goals of dramatically curtailing the size and spending of the federal government. But Congress, not OPM, controls and authorizes federal employment and related spending by the federal administrative agencies, and Congress has determined that each agency is responsible for managing its own employees. OPM lacks the constitutional, statutory, or regulatory authority to order federal agencies to terminate employees in this fashion that Congress has authorized those agencies to hire and manage, and certainly has no authority to require agencies to perpetrate a massive fraud on the federal workforce by lying about federal workers’ ‘performance,’ to detriment of those workers, their families, and all those in the public and private sectors who rely upon those workers for important services …
Notwithstanding this lack of legal authority, OPM ordered federal agencies throughout the nation, including in this District, to wipe out their ranks of probationary employees without any regard to applicable statutes, including the Administrative Procedure Act (‘APA’) and statutes governing federal employment and the respective roles of OPM and the agencies. OPM also ordered the agencies to use a template e-mail to terminate these workers, provided by OPM, that falsely inform employees that their terminations are for performance reasons rather than as part of a government-wide policy to reduce headcount that was authorized by no law.
[Emphasis added.]
ProPublica published an incredibly informative piece on what happened behind the scenes with that OPM.
According to Andy Knoll:
On Feb. 20, nearly 7,000 probationary employees at the Internal Revenue Service began receiving an unsigned letter telling them that they had been fired for poor performance. Trump administration lawyers insist that the IRS and other federal agencies have acted within their authority when they ordered waves of mass terminations since Trump took office.
ProPublica published an excerpt from that email:
ProPublica continues:
But according to previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica, a top lawyer at the IRS warned administration officials that the performance-related language in his agency’s termination letter was ‘a false statement; that amounted to ‘fraud’ if the agency kept the language in the letter.
The emails reveal that in the hours before the IRS sent out its Feb. 20 termination letter, a fierce dispute played out at the agency’s highest levels. Joseph Rillotta, a senior IRS lawyer, wrote that ‘no one’ at the IRS had taken into account the performance of the probationary workers set to be fired. Rillotta urged that the language be struck from the draft termination letter. If the falsehood wasn’t removed, Rillotta said he would file a report with the inspector general for the IRS.
No one appeared to respond to Rillotta’s first email. In a follow-up email, he said he was ‘pleading with you to remove the clause,’ adding: ‘It is not an immaterial false statement, because it is designed to improve the government’s posture in litigation (to the detriment of the employees that we are terminating today).’ Because it was not true, he wrote, ‘That renders it, as I see it, an anticipatory fraud on tribunals of jurisdiction over these employment actions.’ Rillotta was again ignored. The IRS sent out the Feb. 20 termination notice with the disputed language in it, according to copies received by fired workers who shared them with ProPublica. The notice said the decision to fire the workers had taken ‘into account your performance’ as well as administration guidance and ‘current mission needs.’
[Emphasis added.]
If you can get rid of those not willing to support the MAGA agenda, and you have gotten the right people in place, well…
Which brings us to The Washington Post’s report of February 16, 2025:
The Post explains:
Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is seeking access to a heavily guarded Internal Revenue Service system that includes detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country, according to three people familiar with the activities, sparking alarm within the tax agency.
Under pressure from the White House, the IRS is considering a memorandum of understanding that would give officials from DOGE — which stands for Department of Government Efficiency — broad access to tax-agency systems, property and datasets. Among them is the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS, which enables tax agency employees to access IRS accounts — including personal identification numbers — and bank information. It also lets them enter and adjust transaction data and automatically generate notices, collection documents and other records.
According to a draft of the memorandum obtained by The Washington Post, DOGE software engineer Gavin Kliger is set to work at the IRS for 120 days, though the tax agency and the White House can renew his deployment for the same duration … The agreement requires that Kliger maintain confidentiality of tax return information, shield it from unauthorized access and destroy any such information shared with him upon the completion of his IRS deployment.
IDRS access is extremely limited — taxpayers who have had their information wrongfully disclosed or even inspected are entitled by law to monetary damages — and the request for DOGE access has raised deep concern within the IRS, according to three people familiar with internal agency deliberations who, like others in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations …
But it’s highly unusual to grant political appointees access to personal taxpayer data, or even programs adjacent to that data, experts say. IRS commissioners traditionally do not have IDRS access. The same goes for the national taxpayer advocate, the agency’s internal consumer watchdog, according to Nina Olson, who served in the role from 2001 to 2019. ‘The information that the IRS has is incredibly personal. Someone with access to it could use it and make it public in a way, or do something with it, or share it with someone else who shares it with someone else, and your rights get violated,’ Olson said.
[Emphasis added.]
While Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the MAGA faithful will repeat again and again that their main goal is reducing waste and promoting efficiency, there are far more insidious motives at work, and there is a method to the madness when it comes to many of the cuts being made:
As The Washington Post notes, there are clear ramifications to cutting staff:
The Internal Revenue Service’s burgeoning efforts to more closely inspect the taxes of some of the country’s richest people and most powerful companies are stalling, thanks to layoffs imposed by the Trump administration, say current and former IRS employees.
The IRS terminated about 7 percent of its roughly 100,000-person workforce in February, including at least 5,000 in the enforcement and collections divisions. More layoffs are expected. Meanwhile, tax investigators working on drugs and criminal syndicates may be reassigned to help the Department of Homeland Security.
Current and former employees don’t know who will take on pending audits amid these staff cuts. But some say one demographic stands to benefit. ‘The wealthy. One hundred percent,’ said Anthony Kim, a longtime IRS attorney now in private practice. It’s a sharp turnaround from 2022, when Congress gave the IRS $80 billion over a decade under the Inflation Reduction Act, including funds to beef up its auditing of the wealthiest Americans. The agency hired new employees and bulked up units trained to detangle some of the most complicated corporate returns, which can run hundreds or thousands of pages.
Here is a closer look at what the auditing power of the IRS can accomplish:
IRS leadership on Thursday announced that the agency has recovered $4.7 billion in back taxes and proceeds from a variety of crimes since the nation’s tax collector received a massive infusion of funding through Democrats’ flagship tax, climate and health law in 2022.
The announcement comes under the backdrop of a promised reckoning from Republicans who will hold a majority in both chambers of the next Congress and have long called for rescinding the tens of billions of dollars in funding provided to the agency by Democrats … Republicans plan to renew some $4 trillion in expiring tax cuts, a signature domestic achievement of Trump’s first term and an issue that may define his return to the White House …
Tax collections announced Thursday include $1.3 billion from high-income taxpayers who did not pay overdue tax debts, $2.9 billion related to IRS Criminal Investigation work into crimes like drug trafficking and terrorist financing, and $475 million in proceeds from criminal and civil cases that stemmed from whistleblower information. The IRS also announced Thursday that it has collected $292 million from more than 28,000 high-income non-filers who have not filed taxes since 2017, an increase of $120 million since September.
It is important to note that while things are looking up for the wealthiest of Americans, Trump, Musk, and DOGE are determined to make things more difficult for the rest of us. The IRS has been firing those who help guide ordinary taxpayers, plans to end easy-to-file options, and is closing its offices throughout the country.
On March 7, 2025, the Worcester Telegram Gazette reported on the federal buildings DOGE wanted to get rid of in Massachusetts: “A complete list of properties initially provided on the GSA’s website includes nine buildings across Massachusetts. (The list has since been replaced with a site saying the list is ‘coming soon,’ but is available as a web archive through third parties.)”
You will be interested to see that our own Conte Building in Pittsfield is on the chopping block:
If there is any hope for us, it will come from the courts. On March 13, 2025, AP reported:
Two federal judges handed down orders requiring President Donald Trump’s administration to rehire thousands, if not tens of thousands, of probationary workers let go in mass firings across multiple agencies Thursday, slowing down for now the president’s dramatic downsizing of the federal government. Both judges separately found legal problems with the way the mass terminations were carried out and ordered the employees at least temporarily brought back on the job …
In San Francisco, U.S. District Judge William Alsup found Thursday morning that terminations across six agencies were directed by the Office of Personnel Management and an acting director, Charles Ezell, who lacked the authority to do so. In Baltimore, U.S. District Judge James Bredar found that the administration did not follow laws set out for large-scale layoffs, including 60 days’ advance notice. Bredar, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, ordered the firings temporarily halted and the workforce returned to the status quo before the layoffs began …
Alsup’s order tells the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, the Interior and the Treasury to immediately offer job reinstatement to employees terminated on or about Feb. 13 and 14. He also directed the departments to report back within seven days with a list of probationary employees and an explanation of how the agencies complied with his order as to each person …
Alsup expressed frustration with what he called the government’s attempt to sidestep laws and regulations governing a reduction in its workforce — which it is allowed to do — by firing probationary workers who lack protections and cannot appeal. He was appalled that employees were told they were being fired for poor performance despite receiving glowing evaluations just months earlier. ‘It is sad, a sad day, when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,’ he said. ‘That should not have been done in our country.’ …
He planned to hold an evidentiary hearing Thursday, but Ezell, the OPM acting director, did not appear to testify in court or even sit for a deposition, and the government retracted his written testimony. ‘I know how we get at the truth, and you’re not helping me get at the truth,’ Alsup said to Kelsey Helland, an assistant U.S. attorney.
[Emphasis added.]
On March 24, 2025, The Hill reported that the Trump administration had asked the Supreme Court to block Judge Alsup’s order that they rehire the probationary workers they had dismissed:
The Trump administration’s emergency application comes after an appeals court declined to immediately block Alsup’s order. ‘Those orders have sown chaos as the Executive Branch scrambles to meet immediate compliance deadlines by sending huge sums of government money out the door, reinstating thousands of lawfully terminated workers, undoing steps to restructure Executive Branch agencies, and more,’ acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in the application.
The Trump administration claims:
[Judge Alsup’s preliminary injunction] let third parties hijack the employment relationship between the federal government and its workforce. And, like many other recent orders, the court’s extraordinary reinstatement order violates the separation of powers, arrogating to a single district court the Executive Branch’s powers of personnel management on the flimsiest of grounds and the hastiest of timelines. That is no way to run a government. This Court should stop the ongoing assault on the constitutional structure before further damage is wrought …
We are witnessing the wholesale reinvention of our language and the utter reinterpretation of the foundational beliefs of our republic. Somehow, it is now a bad idea to fully staff the IRS so that they can continue to provide the services we need to use, inappropriate for DOGE and OPM bureaucrats to fire government workers on completely fraudulent grounds.
In the Truskmumpian version of America, there is no place for judicial review, no reason for an honest, historically based appreciation of the separation of powers. Thousands can be fired simply because the Executive has decided they won’t do his bidding. And those judges who imagine they still have a place in America need to be removed.
Donald Trump has made clear his kingly feelings about Judge Alsup and his fellow uppity judges:
There is not a moment to be wasted. We need those Geppettos to be working overtime. And we clearly need those Pinocchios yesterday.
In the meantime, there is a simple question to be answered: Do you really want Donald Trump and Elon Musk and all their super-rich buddies to steal even more of our gold?
