Around 100 Kansas City IRS workers fired in nationwide mass termination, union leader says
Around 100 Internal Revenue Service employees in Kansas City have been fired this week, part of a chaotic nationwide mass termination that’s poised to rock the major employer.
National Treasury Employees Union, or NTEU, Chapter 66 president Shannon Ellis told The Star on Friday that probationary employees showed up to work this week and learned that they had lost access to all systems except their emails. Many had their badges and equipment taken without a formal termination letter, Ellis said.
The number of fired employees has changed constantly, but Ellis estimated that roughly 100 were terminated at the Kansas City campus located near Union Station this week. Nationwide, she said she’s heard nearly 6,000 IRS employees have lost their jobs in the past 24 hours.
Ellis was clear that the employees were not laid off. They were terminated in a move that she said will cripple an agency that has been understaffed and underfunded for years.
“We’re being portrayed as waste and that is not the fact,” she said. “These employees, they process your tax returns, they send your refunds, they correct returns, they collect the revenue that fund programs like food stamps…and school lunches and so many more programs that Americans take advantage of.”
The terminations come as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk has sliced through a variety of federal agencies, including the IRS. Since President Donald Trump took office last month, thousands of federal workers in numerous departments have been fired or laid off.
A call to an IRS media line was not immediately returned on Friday.
The IRS’s Kansas City campus employs more than 4,000 workers, including employees who help process tax returns. Numerous outlets, including The Associated Press and The New York Times, have reported that the agency was bracing to lay off thousands of probationary employees nationwide.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, in a social media post Friday morning, pointed federal workers to a website that directs applicants to local government jobs.
“Kansas City is proud to have thousands of outstanding federal workers here,” Lucas wrote. “We’d be honored if you considered staying in public service if you’ve experienced a recent, sudden separation.”
When asked by The Star how workers learned of the terminations, Ellis said employees received notices from “a strange email address” that appeared to have been created solely for firings.
She painted a chaotic portrait of employees being forced to sit around the office, unsure whether they’ve been terminated — or if they’ll be fired next. The situation changes by the minute, she said.
“This is nothing like we’ve ever experienced. It was very confusing,” she said. “We’re still getting people walked out and without notice and there was no indication this was coming, other than watching what’s happened in other agencies.”
This story was originally published February 21, 2025 at 2:08 PM.
