'We are the easy targets': IRS worker laid off by DOGE had received just 1 paycheck before getting fired

For thousands of probationary employees at the Internal Revenue Service, February’s mass firings carried out by the Trump administration came without warning.

“There were about 15 people in my training class,” Jasper Hudgins-Bradley, 38, of Overland Park, Kan., told Yahoo News. “We were led into a room, and our managers came in and let us know that they had just gotten word that we had to be fired. Then we were walked out of the building.”

For Hudgins-Bradley, the news was hard to take. A high school dropout who went on to earn a GED, he’d spent years struggling to secure a well-paying job and to keep up with his bills.

“I have had so many jobs in my life where I’ve worked really hard and then had nothing to show for it,” he said.

In September of last year he applied with the IRS, and after completing a series of interviews, learned in December that he’d been hired. He began training on Jan. 27 in the small-business collections department at the IRS office in Kansas City, Mo., learning how to educate people and businesses who’d fallen behind on their taxes on how to set up payment plans.

With his first paycheck, Hudgins-Bradley got a glimpse of how his hand-to-mouth existence might change.

“For the first time, I’d finally got a place and a roof over my head,” he said.

IRS in the crosshairs

For Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE, which was created by executive order in January), jobs like the one Hudgins-Bradley briefly held are an example of waste in a bloated federal workforce. In addition to promising to slash income taxes, the Trump administration has singled out the IRS, with plans to cut as much as half of its 90,000-person workforce, the Associated Press reported, and that’s on top of the 7,000 probationary employees already let go.

A key question about Trump’s plans to decimate the staff at the IRS, however, is whether payroll savings will offset the losses in tax revenue that those employees help the agency to generate.

A new reality

Since being laid off, Hudgins-Bradley has scrambled to jump-start a side career as a massage therapist.

“I’m in a house on my own,” he said. “What happens is based completely on what I can bring in.”

On his website, he has written about his illusory experience with economic stability, and says of probationary employees, “We are being cut because we are the easy targets.”

And there’s deep anger toward the man who is behind the gutting of the federal workforce.

“If you voted for Trump, keep your eyes open and watch. What happens is on you,” Hudgins-Bradley said. “For everyone that didn’t or who regrets voting for Trump, stand together with other people that are hurt and need help.”

Hudgins-Bradley says he believes the administration’s job cuts have brought the country to a “tipping point.”

“They want to dismantle as much as they can so that for the next several decades everyone else is trying to recover,” he said.