Jan. 27 was the official start date of the 2025 tax season and the IRS expects more than 140 million tax returns to be filed by the April 15 deadline.
The IRS told its employees this week that workers involved in the 2025 tax season cannot accept a buyout offer from the Trump administration to federal employees until May.
Federal employees faced a midnight Thursday deadline to accept the buyout offer, known as a “deferred resignation,” which Trump officials say is an attempt to reform the federal workforce. A judge on Thursday placed a temporary hold on the buyout program.
The letter says that “critical filing season positions in Taxpayer Services, Information Technology and the Taxpayer Advocate Service are exempt” from the administration’s buyout plan until May 15. Meanwhile, taxpayers have until April 15 this year to file their taxes unless they get an extension.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose agency oversees the IRS, said in the letter that he is creating an exemption because specific positions within the IRS’s taxpayer services and information technology functions necessary to facilitate a smooth tax filing season are required to continue working until May 15. The exemption also extends to Taxpayer Advocate Service staff.
In January, The White House offered 2 million civilian full-time federal workers an opportunity to stop working and receive pay and benefits through Sept. 30.
“This email is being sent to more than TWO MILLION federal employees,” Katie Miller, a member of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Service,
wrote in a post on social media platform X on Jan. 28, in which she shared a report by Axios indicating that the Trump administration will offer to pay eligible federal workers through the end of September provided that they hand in their resignation by Feb. 6.
A White House official told
The Epoch Times on Feb. 6 that more than 40,000 federal employees had accepted the buyout, although that figure was expected to grow.
“That 40,000 figure was as of yesterday,” the official said. “The number has grown but we aren’t sharing additional numbers until after the deadline.”
But ahead of the midnight deadline, U.S. District Judge George O'Toole in Boston
issued an order pushing back the deadline for the proposed program, giving government employees extra time to decide whether they wish to remain in the federal workforce.
Several
federal employee unions had filed a lawsuit against the directive, with the American Federation of Government Employees and two other unions arguing in court that the offer is “arbitrary and capricious in numerous respects” and “fails to consider possible adverse consequences of the directive provided to millions of federal employees to the continuing functioning of government.”
Several state attorneys general led by Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James this week
said that federal workers should be wary of the offers because they may be misleading and an “attack on federal workers and the services they provide.”
The Trump administration said in a filing this week that it’s not necessary to extend the deadline to take the buyout offer.
“Extending the deadline for the acceptance of deferred resignation on its very last day will markedly disrupt the expectations of the federal workforce, inject tremendous uncertainty into a program that scores of federal employees have already availed themselves of, and hinder the Administration’s efforts to reform the federal workforce,” lawyers for the Trump administration
said.
Jan. 27 was the official start date of the 2025 tax season and the IRS expects more than 140 million tax returns to be filed by the April 15 deadline.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
