Philly metro loses hundreds of federal government jobs as more IRS layoffs loom

From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!

The federal workforce across the Philadelphia metropolitan area has shrunk during the first few months of Donald Trump’s second term as president, according to recently released data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

With a current total of 56,700 workers, 400 federal jobs were lost across the Greater Philadelphia area between January and February.

The average federal worker in Pennsylvania is middle-aged, middle-class and highly educated, but has been working for the federal government for less than 10 years, described Drew DeSilver, a Pew Research Center senior writer who crunched the U.S. Office of Personnel Management database dating back to March 2024.

“And they probably work in either health care or some kind of administrative position,” DeSilver said.

That’s because the largest federal agency with workers in Pennsylvania is the Department of Veterans Affairs — namely, its health division.

The second-largest non-military cluster in Pennsylvania is the U.S. Treasury, which includes workers at the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Mint, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (which regulates financial institutions), the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and the Inspector General for Tax Administration.

The employment data gives a glimpse into how the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, may affect the local labor market.

For now, the layoffs are less than what people expected, said Joshua Mask, assistant economics professor at Temple University.

“I think partially it may be because people found new jobs, left the labor force or for a variety of reasons didn’t claim unemployment just yet,” Mask said. “But we could potentially start to see that in the coming months.”

Even so, Mask doesn’t predict that the 200,000 federal workers losing their jobs nationwide are enough “to throw us into a recession.”

And the federal workforce in the local region is not large enough to drag down overall local employment outlook.

There were 3 million nonfarm jobs across the metro area, and 14,200 were added between January and February; plus, there are more nonfarm jobs in the region compared to last year. Job gains have been led by the private education and health services sector, as well as professional and business services.

But there are threats of even more layoffs at the Philadelphia Internal Revenue Service hub, according to an email recently sent to workers shared with WHYY News.

This would be in addition to 400 probationary workers who lost their jobs in February; though they were temporarily reinstated, the workers lost a Supreme Court ruling, so the cuts still stand.

On April 4, the IRS sent an email to workers that it is beginning “a reduction in force that will result in staffing cuts across multiple offices and job categories,” saying the reason is to “increase efficiency and effectiveness of the IRS in accordance with agency priorities and the workforce optimization initiative outlined in a recent executive order.”

This year, about 5% of the Philadelphia IRS office have already left their jobs through Trump’s deferred resignation program and natural attrition.

Another 75% of the Philadelphia IRS office “will be reduced through a [reduction in force]” which is a structured layoff process required for federal workers.

But the email is not considered an official notification of a reduction in force and instead workers will get individual notices up to 60 days before they would be laid off.

The email instructs employees to upload a current résumé, which will be used to determine whether the worker will be laid off or not.

As of early April, there were 4,500 total IRS workers in Philadelphia. The majority are covered by a local chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union.

“The response from members can be summed up easily: dread, fear, shock and awe, and not awe in a good way,” said Alex Berman, executive vice president of the Philadelphia National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 71, about the recent email. “This is more of the vengeance tour to oppress and humiliate and scare federal employees.”

Several hundred workers operate a call center that answers the IRS taxpayer hotline, but there’s also a department for collections and correspondences that handles taxpayer appeals.

The Philadelphia IRS hub once employed 10,000 workers, before the major layoff aka reduction in force conducted between 2003 and 2007 — that’s when the hub still processed individual tax returns.

“That was a properly conducted [reduction in force], by which I mean in line with the law, rule, regulation and contractual statute,” Berman said.

During the reduction in force process, workers must be notified at least 30 days in advance plus a negotiation period with the union for three months prior. Workers could swap jobs, get upskilled for a newly available job within the same agency or retire early.

But this time around, it’s not so clear.

“They’re saying this is not an official RIF note because that would start the required legal time frame and they’re trying to play fast and loose with that stuff,” Berman said.

And it’s happening during the middle of the busiest time of year for the IRS: tax season. The deadline to file federal taxes is April 15.

“We will bend over backwards and work ourselves to the bone to make sure the current year filing season is handled properly, even when we’re understaffed,” Berman said.