IRS Lawyer Ousted as Elon Musk’s DOGE Plans Even More Cuts
DOGE is planning crippling cuts to the IRS—and has shoved a top agency lawyer out in the process.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is shaking up the Internal Revenue Service, running into resistance from career staff as it seeks sensitive taxpayer information.
The IRS’s top lawyer, William Paul, was removed from his position Thursday despite only having the job for two months. It’s part of DOGE’s plans to cut nearly 20 percent of the tax agency’s staff despite income taxes being due in less than a month. The acting IRS commissioner was told by DOGE to eliminate 18,141 jobs from the agency by May 15, according to The Washington Post.
The largest cuts would come from the tax compliance department, which would lose 8,260 jobs, followed by taxpayer services with 3,247 cuts, followed by information technology. This would only be the first level of cuts, with DOGE signaling even more terminations to come. None of this would help with processing tax returns, but the Trump administration has other concerns: getting the addresses of undocumented immigrants.
The Department of Homeland Security wants the IRS to hand over the addresses of about 700,000 undocumented immigrants, which career employees believe is illegal. Along with Paul’s departure, DOGE’s ongoing purge of the federal workforce has left longtime IRS employees worried. One IRS veteran who had worked at the agency for decades, Doug O’Donnell, left the agency last month.
Musk and DOGE hope to use IRS records in their goal to go after fraud in spending on federal benefits, hoping to check those benefits against tax records. The agency’s staff is concerned about legal protections against the use of such sensitive information, joining their counterparts in other agencies, including the Social Security Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services.
These moves could damage an important government agency, but that may be by design. Conservatives have long opposed the IRS, and Trump has claimed that his tariffs could supplant income tax revenue with his new “External Revenue Service.” It remains to be seen how the government will function with a severely weakened IRS.