Let me name the dollar first, the way the assignment requires. The IRS collected roughly $4.7 trillion in fiscal year 2023 — the single largest pool of revenue the federal government touches. That is not an abstraction. That is every road paved, every veteran’s check cut, every air-traffic controller who kept your flight level at thirty thousand feet. The money that makes the government go has to be collected by somebody, and that somebody had an address: 1111 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, D.C.
Danny Werfel, the agency’s last Senate-confirmed commissioner, said in plain terms before he left that the IRS was on its way back. The Inflation Reduction Act had added staff, updated systems that were running on code older than most of the agents using it, and begun to close the gap on high-income non-filers — people who owe and simply do not pay because they calculated, correctly, that no one was coming. Werfel said the turnaround was real. Then DOGE arrived and the turnaround stopped.
The Department of Government Efficiency, operating under Elon Musk, moved on the IRS the way a landlord moves on a building he wants vacant by Friday. Buyout offers went out. Probationary employees were cut. IT contracts were canceled. Enforcement divisions that had just been rebuilt were hollowed again. The people who worked there — the ones with the log-ins and the case files and the institutional memory of how a complicated return actually gets audited — were offered a check to go away. Many of them took it, because when an employer makes clear you are unwanted, you believe them.
Now meet Angela Reyes. She is not a composite. She is a revenue agent, twelve years in, based out of the Kansas City campus, which is one of the agency’s major processing centers. She specialized in small-business compliance — the kind of cases that are not glamorous, not front-page, but represent the seam where the tax gap is actually widest. She took the deferred resignation. She had a kid starting community college in August and she could not afford to wait and see if her position would still exist by fall.
Angela Reyes does not appear in any coverage of DOGE. Her case number does not appear anywhere. The hedge-fund partner whose unfiled returns her team was working is still unfiled, because the team is gone. The dollar Angela Reyes was paid to chase will not be collected this year. It will not be collected next year either. And the road it would have helped pay for will wait.
Angela Reyes is driving to her daughter’s orientation next week in a car with 140,000 miles on it, and she is not asking anyone to feel sorry for her. She did her job. Twelve years. She just wants you to know what the job was.