She left McDonald’s for IRS job in KC. Trump firings made her feel like ‘piece of trash’
Kelli McGlothlin loved working for the Internal Revenue Service in Kansas City. She enjoyed her co-workers. She didn’t even mind waking at 3 a.m. for the commute from her home in St. Joseph.
“I really enjoyed serving for the federal government,” McGlothlin said. “And then I just get hit, wham, with hey, you’re not important anymore, let’s throw you away like a piece of trash.”
McGlothlin was fired in February, one of roughly 100 terminations at the IRS campus in Kansas City.
President Donald Trump’s push to slash through the federal government, led by the billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency initiative, was expected to target thousands of IRS positions nationwide.
Federal workers in the Kansas City region – at the IRS and other agencies – fear more firings are coming. The federal Office of Management and Budget has directed agency leaders to submit plans this month for additional cuts. The Social Security Administration, which employs thousands in the Kansas City region, announced last week it plans to cut jobs and reorganize the agency.
The Star spoke with McGlothlin and other fired Kansas City IRS workers. All of them said their jobs at the IRS were supposed to mark a new start in their lives.
For instance, Overland Park resident Jasper Hudgins-Bradley had been with the agency for less than a month, but the job had already allowed him to pay off bills. The Star profiled him last week.
McGlothlin, 43, was a mere three weeks from exiting her probationary period as a tax-examining clerk after joining the IRS in March 2024. All of the fired workers were probationary, meaning the workers had been with the IRS for one or two years depending on the position.
If the firings had come just a month later, she likely would still have a job.
“I just felt betrayed,” McGlothlin said. “We didn’t do anything wrong, I never did anything wrong. I did a lot of work for them.”
From McDonald’s to the IRS
The IRS marked a sharp change in McGlothlin’s life.
Before joining the agency, she worked 24 years at McDonald’s. She had been a general manager, essentially overseeing a restaurant.
McGlothlin remembers some parts of her time with McDonald’s fondly. Her location wasn’t too far from the Kansas City Chiefs training camp in St. Joseph and she recounted the players and coaches she served over the years, including Travis Kelce (four sausage McMuffins), Rashee Rice (Double McChicken) and Andy Reid (two cheeseburgers with a chocolate shake).
McGlothlin took a pay cut when she took the job at the IRS, a position that paid under $40,000 a year. But the role offered her the kind of job she wanted.
At McDonald’s she had to interact with customers; at the IRS she didn’t. At McDonald’s, she was judged on both the restaurant’s performance, as well as her own. At the IRS, she was judged solely based on her own abilities and work.
And she had great colleagues.
In late August, McGlothlin was injured in a traffic accident when a bus rear-ended her vehicle after she made a sudden stop because of another accident ahead on the road. She broke two bones in her back, her ankle and wrist.
She stayed in the hospital for two weeks followed by 26 days of rehabilitation.
“The IRS, I hadn’t been there that long and they were really sweet about making sure I was OK,” McGlothlin said. “They sent messages, called me. These were the people I worked with.”
Her co-workers were the kind of colleagues who decorated desks for birthdays. Once a month, they would bring back Jack Stack barbecue for lunch.
The day McGlothlin was fired, Feb. 20, managers were crying as employees were terminated, she said.
McGlothlin had arrived at 6 a.m. that day as usual, but then she and many of her co-workers were just made to sit for the entirety of their shift, basically doing nothing as others continued on with their work.
Everyone knew what was coming. “Lots of tears,” she said.
McGlothlin was escorted off the campus at the end of the shift without so much as a termination letter. That would arrive later in the mail.
The letter stated bluntly that the IRS found “your continued employment at the Agency is not in the public interest.”
McGlothlin finds that difficult to understand given what her job entailed. As a tax examining clerk, she sorted cart after cart of mail. The firings last month cut her team roughly in half, she estimated.
The mail she and her co-workers sorted often pertained to levies and liens. In their own way, they helped ensure the U.S. government receives the money it’s owed in taxes.
“So all these rich people are getting away with longer time for their income taxes because the mail hasn’t been processed,” McGlothlin said.
McGlothlin voted for Trump. She blames Musk, who is from South Africa and the world’s richest person, for the current chaos.
“Trump is not the issue. I think Elon Musk is puppeteering a lot of it,” McGlothlin said. “If he’d stay out of the stuff, I think we would be fine. I mean, Trump was fine before. I didn’t have any problems before but all of a sudden he’s acting like he’s being a puppet to this man that’s not even from the United States.”
Trump has stood by Musk as his DOGE operation has entered agency after agency, firing workers and slashing spending in a chaotic, haphazard manner that’s left civil servants stunned. Some Republican lawmakers, including in Kansas and Missouri, have begun encountering a backlash.
On Saturday, Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall encountered a group of angry constituents at a raucous town hall in Oakley in western Kansas. A video showing him leaving the event early circulated widely on social media.
Nearly a week earlier, Missouri Republican Rep. Mark Alford hosted an uproarious town hall in Belton on the outskirts of the Kansas City metro. Alford faced shouting from dozens of attendees for over an hour, including some current and former federal workers.
McGlothlin said Musk has far more access to IRS systems than he should have.
“I don’t think that’s cool that he has all that information,” she said.
A new job?
McGlothlin grew up in St. Joseph, but the IRS job was a possible path to leaving home.
She wants to move her and her two dogs – Layla and Loki – to the Kansas City metro and has her sights set on Liberty, where her family has spent a lot of time. She has family members in Parkville, though she said that city was too expensive. A friend also lives in Platte City.
McGlothlin may yet make her way south.
Less than two weeks after getting fired, McGlothlin is already on the cusp of securing a new job. She’s waiting on a background check, a process she said could take up to 90 days.
Ideally, McGlothlin would love to go back to the IRS and work again with her former co-workers. She’s still talking and texting with some of them every day.
At the same time, she’s preparing herself to move on.
“I’m going to have to do something,” McGlothlin said. “I’m not just going to sit at home and do nothing.”
The new position is about $2,000 less than she made before – working for an IRS contractor.
What’s the job?
“Almost the exact same thing I was doing with the IRS,” McGlothlin said.
This story was originally published March 4, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
