The IRS’s free direct-file tax website is currently still online.
The Trump administration has removed the team of federal workers who helped build the IRS’s free tax-filing platform and reworked websites across government, a General Service Administration (GSA) spokesperson said on March 1.
The GSA’s director of technology transformation services, Thomas Shedd, notified the employees on a digital service team called 18F that they had been deemed “non-critical” and their jobs were terminated, locking out roughly 90 employees from their devices. The IRS’s free direct-file tax website is currently still online.
The GSA said the action was implemented to fulfill a number of President Donald Trump’s executive orders, including one issued on Feb. 11 titled “Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Workforce Optimization Initiative.”
DOGE leader Elon Musk, who heads the effort at the behest of the president, shared a post on social media platform X on Feb. 3 that called 18F a “far-left government-wide computer office.” Musk commented that the group had been “deleted.”
The 18F team was first launched under President Barack Obama and was housed within the GSA to help improve digital services for federal agencies.
Those efforts included improving federal website accessibility, modernizing technology, enhancing data access, and ensuring that the government’s customer service experience was more user-friendly.
On Feb. 26, Trump signed an executive order that directed all federal agencies to review all contracts and grants for “waste, fraud, and abuse” and to justify and publicly release government payments and travel expenses where possible. The order calls on those departments to coordinate with DOGE while the GSA creates a plan for offloading any unnecessary government-owned or leased real estate.
Trump is also ordering agency heads to work with DOGE team members at their agencies to “review and terminate all unnecessary contracts” and complete a review within 30 days of the order.
The same week, 21 civil service employees resigned from DOGE after refusing to use their skills to “dismantle critical public services.”
Musk dismissed the resignations and said the workers were “political holdovers who refused to return to the office” and “would have been fired had they not resigned.”
Trump had previously signed an executive order calling for all federal workers to resume in-office employment, ending years of remote work that began during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Feb. 27, a federal judge said a DOGE worker and three other federal officials must come forward and answer questions under oath in a legal case seeking a preliminary injunction to block DOGE’s access to some government systems.
Katabella Roberts and Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.