The Trump administration is preparing to slash the Internal Revenue Service’s 90,000-person workforce in half through a mix of layoffs, attrition and buyouts. That’s on top of the roughly 7,000 IRS workers already laid off since Trump took office, most of them probationary workers fired as part of Elon Musk’s mass purge of federal workers who lack civil service protections. Last month, seven former IRS commissioners, spanning both Democratic and Republican administrations since Ronald Reagan, wrote a joint New York Times op-ed condemning Trump’s cuts to the IRS. They write the cuts will “shift the burden of funding the government from people who shirk their taxes to the honest people who pay them, and it will impede efforts by the I.R.S. to modernize customer service and simplify the tax filing process for everyone.”