Warren Accuses IRS CEO of Downplaying Staffing Shortages After 31,000 Departures

Sen. Elizabeth Warren renewed her criticism of the IRS on Friday, accusing the agency’s chief executive officer, Frank J. Bisignano, of downplaying staffing problems even after the tax agency lost about 31,000 workers and later moved to hire thousands back.

In a July 31 Bluesky post, Warren wrote that “the head of Trump’s IRS told Congress he ‘felt good’ about IRS staffing after the Trump administration fired or pushed out nearly 30,000 workers. … I’m pressing for answers.”

The Massachusetts Democrat’s post follows a July 23 letter she led with 12 other senators that opened an inquiry into whether Bisignano misled Congress and the public about IRS staffing shortages. The letter, released by Warren’s Senate office, sought answers and documents on an early-August timetable.

At the center of the dispute is a June 9 report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the IRS’s independent watchdog. TIGTA said the IRS had 31,273 employee departures from January 2025 through January 2026, amounting to roughly a 28% net workforce reduction. The watchdog said the losses created elevated operational risks.

TIGTA also reported that the IRS had hired back only about 2,000 workers by Jan. 10, 2026, a figure Warren and other senators have used to argue that public assurances from agency leadership did not match the scale of the staffing losses.

Bisignano is the IRS chief executive officer, a position the Treasury Department created in October 2025. In written testimony for a March 4 House Ways and Means Committee hearing, he emphasized filing-season performance. But the statement now under scrutiny came during oral questioning. Contemporaneous reports from the hearing, including NOTUS and Tax Adviser, quoted him as saying: “I feel good about the number of employees I have right now.”

He made similar comments afterward. Fox Business quoted Bisignano on April 13 saying there was “no staffing shortage” at the IRS. Trade reporting on a May 5 meeting quoted him saying, “I honestly have zero staffing concerns.”

Those comments stand in tension with separate reporting by NOTUS, which cited an internal IRS human-capital memo warning in late February that workforce reductions and backlogs “put the 2026 Filing Season at risk.” According to that reporting, the IRS sought and received expedited authority to hire roughly 8,000 employees.

That gap matters because IRS staffing levels are directly tied to taxpayer service. The National Taxpayer Advocate, an independent office within the IRS that reports to Congress on taxpayer service, said in its 2026 midyear report that the agency received 48.1 million calls during the 2026 filing season but answered only 9.9 million, or 21%.

The report also said average wait times rose to 14 minutes from 8 minutes in the prior filing season. More than 14 million tax returns were suspended for additional review, another sign of strain inside the agency during one of its busiest periods.

Warren’s criticism does not, by itself, establish wrongdoing. But the records cited by her office and by watchdog and press reports show a clear contradiction she is now pressing publicly: IRS leaders were offering confident statements about staffing at the same time internal warnings and hiring efforts pointed to significant shortages.

Her July 23 letter asked Bisignano for explanations, staffing records and other documents on an early-August deadline, setting up the next phase of a congressional oversight fight over whether the IRS presented an overly rosy picture of its workforce as taxpayer service deteriorated.