AUSTIN, Texas — As thousands of employees nationwide grapple with the terminations handed out by the IRS, unions are working toward next steps.
Eddie Walker represents 1,500 IRS employees in Austin as the president of the National Treasury Employees Union’s 247th chapter. He called the mass layoffs an “overnight assault.”
“Never [have] we encountered a time when there would be a reduction enforced where rules were not followed and time was not taken,” Walker said.
According to Walker, the union filed a lawsuit on Feb. 12, alongside other unions, to halt the mass layoffs, and requested that the Trump Administration as well as the IRS and other federal agencies provide relief to those affected.
Stormi Holloway, who was informed of her termination the day before being laid off, said she was not told about any severance and that her termination reason was due to her performance and “current mission needs.”
Holloway said she worked as a Tax Examining Technician for about eight months and primarily helped taxpayers. However, she said when it came to her performance review, she provided documents that stated she was up to par.
“I just lost my great grandmother, who I was a caretaker for, and my only job,” Holloway said.
Holloway got the news of her termination the same week her great-grandmother had passed, and is now at a loss for what her next steps will be. She said not much word has been given.
“I don’t really know where to go from here,” Holloway said. “I just hope that we can help all the people that have lost their jobs and who deserve to be a federal employee, to come back to work and do the job that they wanted to do.”
The layoffs are part of a nationwide sweeping effort led by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency which targeted probationary employees to make the federal workforce more efficient. It’s a move that Holloway noted doesn’t make sense.
“That’s what kind of helped me sleep at night … knowing that I am making a difference in people’s lives,” Holloway said. “But with this, the efficiency being cited as the reason it doesn’t make sense.”
Walker said in his 23 years as chapter president that he’s never seen this scale of layoffs. He also questioned the legality of it and anticipates more layoffs in the coming months.
“It’s not a win-win by any chance,” Walker said. “It’s not a win-lose by any chance; it’s a lose-lose for the taxpayer and for the employees.”