Seeing the list in full makes the reality unavoidable: United States is stepping away not from one institution, but from the architecture.

A group of fired National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees is getting their jobs back — for the second time — and will receive nine months of back pay. Last month, NOAA sent an email to several fired employees, informing them that their April 2025 termination is being rescinded and they have the option to return to their jobs. “As we discussed, NOAA is committed to a fresh start and we are eager to have you back on the team,” according to the email obtained by Federal News Network. “We recognize that it has been over six months since you were in this role, and we are prepared to support your transition back into the workplace.”  The Trump administration fired about 25,000 probationary federal employees around mid-February, including about 650 probationary employees at NOAA. Agencies cited performance and misconduct as reasons for the terminations, even in cases where employees received outstanding performance reviews. Probationary employees are generally still serving in their first year on the job, and are easier to remove than more tenured federal employees. But some affected federal employees were serving in probationary periods because they had recently accepted promotions.  Those employees were briefly reinstated following rulings by federal judges in March, only to be fired again in April after the Supreme Court paused the lower courts’ reinstatement orders. During that brief period, a fraction of reinstated NOAA employees completed their probationary period. A reinstated NOAA employee, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation, told Federal News Network that eligible individuals received calls from the agency’s human resources office with reinstatement offers just before Christmas, and that about 40 former employees have been reinstated.  “It will be like as if you never left. It will be as if you’ve been on administrative leave the entire time,” the employee recalled. A NOAA spokesperson declined to comment.  Terminated employees who do not want their jobs back will still receive about nine months of back pay. NOAA will designate their separations as voluntary resignations from federal service, effective Dec 22, 2025. “Please note that a decision to depart from federal service voluntarily will not impact your pay for the period on administrative leave. You will still receive back pay for the period of April 10, 2025 to January 12, 2026,” the email states. According to the email, former NOAA employees who received reinstatement offers had until Monday to accept the offer. Those who accepted the offer will return to work on Jan. 12.   The email states that failure to respond by the deadline “may result in disciplinary action against you, up to and including your removal from the federal service.” A federal judge in San Francisco ruled in September that the Office of Personnel Management unlawfully “directed agencies to fire under false pretense,” and ordered agencies to update personnel records to specify that these employees were not fired for poor performance or misconduct.  The judge, however, stopped short of offering reinstatement to fired probationary employees, citing a Supreme Court ruling last summer that the Trump administration has broad authority to reshape and shrink the federal workforce. It’s not clear how many former NOAA employees declined reinstatement. The reinstated employee told Federal News Network that many former employees have “moved on” and pursued other work. “I feel like I really closed the NOAA chapter for myself and sort of mourned that. It’s a place I originally thought I would spend my entire career — at least a significant portion. It’s a place where people are very passionate about the work, including myself,” the former employee said. “I had gone through that kind of grieving period. And I think having to even just make the decision of whether or not I was going to go back was emotional in many ways. You think you’ve moved on, and then all of a sudden, very unexpectedly, this opportunity presented itself.” The former employee said a “sense of the importance of public service” was part of the reason for accepting reinstatement. “Especially right now with how severe the staffing cuts have been at NOAA, when they can’t hire more people — at least right now, in most parts of the agency — I felt called to go back and help support my old office,” the reinstated employee said. Politico’s E&E News reported last month that the Environmental Protection Agency has also rehired probationary employees it fired in early 2025.The post ‘A fresh start.’ NOAA reinstates some probationary employees it already fired twice first appeared on Federal News Network.

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The IRS is weeks away from the start of a busier-than-usual filing season. But a group of senators is warning that the agency may be stretched too thin after losing more than a quarter of its employees. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) led 15 other senators in a Dec. 21 letter raising concerns about the start of the IRS filing season. The letter, addressed to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — who is also serving as acting IRS commissioner — and IRS Chief of Taxpayer Services Ken Corbin, states the 2026 tax filing season “will present a huge test for the IRS.” “We write with serious concerns that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is not prepared for the upcoming tax filing season and that American taxpayers may face delays and difficulties in filing their tax returns and receiving their tax refunds,” the senators wrote. All senators on the list are Democrats, except for King and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — both of whom caucus with Senate Democrats. The IRS lost about 25% of its workforce last year through voluntary separations and retirements. A recent report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found these staffing cuts will make it more difficult for the IRS to detect fraud, process tax returns, and provide tax help over the phone and in-person at its Taxpayer Assistance Centers. The TIGTA report also raises concerns that staffing cuts in the IRS’s IT department are delaying the agency’s ability to modernize its systems, including an initiative to digitize much of its paper-based workload. “Taxpayers deserve to have the information and assistance they need to file their taxes and receive their refunds in a timely manner,” the senators wrote. “The Trump administration’s relentless attacks on the IRS threaten its ability to serve the public and undercut its mission to provide taxpayers with top-quality service and ensure that our tax laws are enforced with integrity and fairness.” The IRS paused its IT modernization efforts in March. But internal documents show the agency is planning to modernize a more than 50-year-old IT system that’s critical to its work every filing season. Internal documents obtained by Federal News Network show the agency is working on a “future state” of its Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS), a massive clearinghouse of taxpayer data. IDRS allows IRS employees to review an individual’s tax information when they call asking for help, or send tax notices to individuals. The system also makes it possible for taxpayers to track the status of their federal tax return refund check. The IRS expects that this modernization project, once complete, will make it much easier for employees to retrieve a taxpayer’s records when they contact the agency asking for help. The internal documents show the IRS is working with several tech companies on this project, including Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and Palantir. IRS employees were told last summer that layoffs were off the table. But during the recent government shutdown, the Treasury Department sent reduction-in-force notices to nearly 1,400 IRS employees. Employees affected included those working in tax enforcement, IT and human resources. Those RIFs were rescinded, but layoff protections contained in a stopgap spending bill are set to expire on Jan. 30. The agency lacks a permanent commissioner. Seven acting commissioners led the agency last year. Former congressman Billy Long, President Donald Trump’s first permanent pick to lead the agency, stepped down last August. During his two-month tenure at the IRS, Long fell out of step with senior Treasury officials on several decisions. Those included rescinding RIFs within its Office of Civil Rights and Compliance, announcing that Direct File was “gone” months ahead of the agency’s official announcement, and stating the 2026 filing season would begin in mid-February, later than usual, to give the IRS workforce more time to prepare. The IRS has not yet announced the start date of this year’s filing season. Federal News Network has reached out to the Treasury Department and the IRS for comment. National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins, in her mid-year report to Congress last summer, said this year’s filing season was “largely successful.” But taxpayers may see delays during the 2026 filing season, given major staffing cuts. This year’s filing season will be busier than usual. The IRS must update dozens of federal tax forms to reflect changes made under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The IRS, as part of its fiscal 2026 budget request, said it needs to hire 11,000 call center representatives to “maintain” its current level of phone service. Without those hires, the agency warned it would only be able to answer about 16% of phone calls during next year’s filing season. The IRS in July put out hiring notices to fill 4,500 full-time contact service representative jobs, but quickly pulled down those notices from USAJobs. Months later, the IRS announced it would fill more than 2,150 frontline customer service positions. More than 70% of those job posts are for seasonal hires that can’t stay on the job for more than four years. Term appointments generally don’t count toward career tenure, making it harder for employees to qualify for certain competitive service rights or transfer opportunities. The Trump administration proposed giving the IRS more than $850 million to help the IRS hire those employees and roll out new automation tools to assist taxpayers. But the House Appropriations Committee advanced its fiscal 2026 spending bill without these funds — and deeper overall IRS budget cuts than what the administration proposed. The IRS recently moved about 1,000 IT employees out of its tech shop as part of a reorganization plan that’s been underway for months. Impacted employees say they have few details about what work they’ll be doing, reportedly advised by the agency to instead “focus on completing an orderly transition of your current work.” The notice they received states that they will no longer be working on IRS IT projects. According to the notice, obtained by Federal News Network, the reassignments went into effect on Dec. 28. Employees who received the email have until Jan. 9 to complete an “orderly transition.” That includes wrapping up current work, offloading assignments and supporting project handoffs. Employees in question have been told that their reassignment is “permanent realignment out of the CIO organization,” but the move to the Office of the Chief Operating Officer is temporary. The agency’s HR office is looking to reassign the employees to jobs across the IRS and Treasury. Reassigned employees are being asked to upload their resumes no later than Jan. 23, 2026. The IRS stayed open on Dec. 24 and Dec. 26, even though President Donald Trump gave most federal employees those days off. The agency sought volunteers to work those days, offering holiday pay to those who signed up. The agency’s acting chief human capital officer told staff in a memo that keeping the IRS open would allow employees to “continue to work mission-critical efforts.”The post ‘A huge test for the IRS’: Senators warn shrinking workforce may hamper upcoming filing season first appeared on Federal News Network.

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