Chavi Schwarzbaum and her colleagues at the Internal Revenue Service office in Center City had been nervous about their jobs for a few weeks.
But they really started getting worried about a week ago, when they heard that Elon Musk and his DOGE cost-cutting team were beginning to focus on the IRS. Her group was at a training in Tennessee at the time.
“We were like, ‘Oh, no. What happens if they fire us on Thursday night or Friday morning? Will that mean that they cancel our flights? Are we going to be stuck in Tennessee and have to all drive home?’ It was awful,” she said.
They finally got the bad news in a pair of emails this week, on Wednesday and Thursday. Some 400 probationary employees were fired, most of them from the large IRS office at 30th and Market streets in University City and others from Schwarzbaum’s office at 6th and Arch streets.
Distraught managers, told with little notice to go into work and oversee the firings, watched as their employees packed up and left, she said.
“It’s heartbreaking, what’s going on, and the feeling internally is awful,” Schwarzbaum said Friday, in an interview from her home in Rhawnhurst. “You just walk around, everyone’s crying, everyone’s devastated, people’s lives are upended.”
Those who escaped termination are nonetheless petrified that their jobs will soon be on the chopping block as well, she said.
“The mood was dark and intense. We felt like we were pawns in a game and just waiting for our turn to come and get knocked off the board. There is real fear among all employees about what their future looks like,” she said. “The sense of authoritarianism and disruption is not to be understated.”
Targeting the IRS during tax season
The IRS purge was the latest and most extensive batch of firings of federal employees in Philadelphia, part of a nationwide downsizing of the government workforce by the Trump administration that has reportedly hit more than 10,000 workers.
Most of them are probationary employees, who had less than a year on the job or who were recently promoted, and cannot easily appeal their dismissals.
In the Philly area they include National Park Service rangers, an FAA aviation safety worker at the airport, and employees of the Environmental Protection Agency, General Services Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and Department of Agriculture, according to media reports.
Many report their termination notices included boilerplate language saying they were fired for performance reasons, despite having been in training for much of their short tenures and receiving praise from their managers for the quality of their work.
“They are citing the reason why I’m fired is because of my performance. But until today I hadn’t gotten a performance review,” Nicholas Berardi, who worked for the IRS for about three months, told 6ABC after he was let go Thursday.
“We didn’t have time for an annual review,” said Schwarzbaum, who started at the IRS last May. “My mid-year review was great. [Our managers] are besides themselves. Their entire team is getting let go. They put so much into us, and they’re devastated, they’re heartbroken.”
Outside the University City office on Thursday, some fired employees said losing so many people during tax season could impact services and even invite fraud, a sentiment echoed by their representatives at the National Treasury Employees Union.
“For people who would say that these cuts are necessary, I have two questions,” Alex Jay Berman, executive vice president for NTEU Chapter 71, told 6ABC. “Don’t you want your federal government to work? And don’t you want your federal government to work for all Americans?”
The IRS has more than 3,600 employees in Philadelphia, the Inquirer reported.
Nationally the agency has about 100,000 employees, of which 6,700 are being terminated. Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said Thursday that the dismissals are “absolutely on the table for good reasons” and that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent believes the IRS can afford to lose more than 3,500 people, the New York Times reported.
A federal judge on Thursday denied requests from multiple labor unions to block the mass firings, saying they need to go before the Federal Labor Relations Authority first. The unions have pledged to continue pursuing their cases.
“The lawsuit we filed with our labor union partners will be heard and federal employees will get their day in court to challenge the unlawful mass firings and other attacks on their jobs, their agencies and their service to the country,” NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said.
Reversing an IRS revival
Schwarzbaum is a Philly native who worked in the tax department of a New York financial planning firm for 15 years.
She said she waited for years for the notoriously understaffed IRS to start hiring people. It finally began doing so two years ago, after Congress appropriated $80 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Biden administration released an expansion plan.
Her old firm offered her a financial incentive to stay, but she declined it in favor of the more stable work schedule at the IRS, she said.
“I was making this change because I wanted to be more available to my children,” said Schwarzbaum, who has kids aged 10, 14 and 16. “I just felt like, before they leave the house, I don’t want their memory of me to only be sitting in the basement doing taxes.”
“I left a lot of money on the table to be fired after nine months,” she added.
At the IRS she audited large corporations, looking for errors or income missing from their tax filings. Corrections she made could add millions of dollars to their tax bills, she said.
“Whether it’s penalties, whether it’s transactions that were not deductible, or income that wasn’t picked up, or things that weren’t recorded correctly,” she said.
She noted that her division also audits high-net-worth individuals. The federal government has been losing out on vast sums of tax revenues it’s owed, not so much because people are trying to evade paying but because the IRS has lacked staff to help them understand their responsibilities, she said.
“The IRS was severely underfunded for a very long time. There was no one to answer their questions, and many of them, once we bring things to their attention, they want to do the right thing. But they need help,” she said.
Given Musk and President Donald Trump’s focus on saving money, it makes no sense to target the IRS and Treasury Department for downsizing, especially in the middle of tax season, Schwarzbaum argued.
“Everyone’s talking about the deficit. If you’re going to cut anyone, why are you cutting the IRS? Who’s going to bring in the revenue?” she asked.
Demanding elected officials make a stink
Schwarzbaum said she’s fortunate because her husband has a job that provides health insurance for the family. Many of those terminated don’t have that luxury, she said. She also expects to pick up some work doing freelance tax accounting.
But her main focus at the moment is calling and emailing her elected officials and demanding they fight back against the purge.
“I understand that a lot of this is happening by executive order, so their power to actually make a change is limited. But their power to speak out is not, and I don’t feel that I’m hearing elected officials enough, and I’m not hearing them aggressively enough,” she said.
“Where’s [U.S. Rep.] Brendan Boyle? Where’s Senator Fetterman? Where’s Governor Shapiro? Why isn’t there a coalition of Democratic governors standing up?” she said. Lawsuits are good, “but that’s not what the common man is going to hear and understand. The Democrats need to start taking a different approach and I don’t see them doing it.”
(Boyle did criticize the IRS firings, calling them “a blow to these families, to our local economy, and to every taxpayer.” Fetterman has gone after Musk for trying to access IRS tax data, but does not appear to have mentioned the firings. Shapiro hasn’t discussed the terminations specifically, but on Friday he wrote, “Pennsylvania union workers are the best in the nation — and I’ll always have their backs.”)
Trump’s mass firing of hundreds of IRS workers in Philly is a blow to these families, to our local economy, and to every taxpayer.
We’re right in the middle of tax season — and these layoffs will mean longer wait times for our neighbors as they seek help from the IRS. https://t.co/KGguTUIbza
— Rep. Brendan Boyle (@CongBoyle) February 21, 2025
In addition to pressing elected officials, Schwarzbaum said she may volunteer with the NTEU if she can find time around looking for new work.
“I want this to be a thing. I want to shake up the system a little. That’s my plan for the next two weeks,” she said. “And then after that, to start looking for something more permanent.”
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2025-02-21 14:09:15
