On today’s show: ProPublica’s Andy Kroll examines how Trump’s cuts at the IRS could make it harder for the federal government to root out fraud. Dylan Baddour of Inside Climate News joins to explain a case at the Supreme Court pitting Texas against the federal government on nuclear-waste disposal. Leslie Patton, a consumer reporter at Bloomberg News, examines what happened to one company as the backlash to black-plastic kitchen utensils grew. Plus, the Supreme Court denies Trump’s request to cancel nearly $2 billion in foreign aid, D.C. officials will remove Black Lives Matter Plaza, and why scientists genetically engineered woolly mice. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Full Episode
Good morning. It's Thursday, March 6th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, the debate over where to put the country's nuclear waste, consumers are taking the risk of plastics more seriously, and how scientists are trying to revive the woolly mammoth. But first, to the Internal Revenue Service.
Tax season is upon us, but roughly 7,000 employees were recently fired by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's Doge team. They've said their goal is to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.
The IRS has been hit especially hard by these cuts, ProPublica reports, because it did a lot of hiring and training in 2024, which means a lot of people were still in their probationary period a few weeks ago when they found out they were being cut.
Last year's hiring wave came after Congress had underfunded the agency for a good part of the last decade, which led to chronic understaffing, poor customer service, and plummeting audit rates.
ProPublica spoke with more than a dozen current and former IRS employees, most of whom worked for the Large Business and International Division, or LBNI, which audits some of the highest dollar amount tax returns filed in the country.
Almost half of the engineer positions in LBNI, that is people who have specialized expertise and can weigh in on more complicated tax returns, appear to have been eliminated in the recent cut. And these current and former employees told reporter Andy Kroll that that could make it more difficult for the agency to audit some of the wealthiest people and businesses in the country.
This is the division that handles the most complicated, highest dollar amount, largest tax returns of all the tax returns filed. So we're talking about publicly traded corporations, really complicated private partnerships, and high net worth individuals.
The LB&I specialists focus on auditing big businesses like major tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, and oil and gas companies.
A big part of what the IRS does is root out waste and fraud in tax returns to identify places where taxpayers, whether they're people or companies, are claiming tax perks that they shouldn't be claiming or they're claiming too much or they're hiding money from the federal government. So the IRS, you would think, fits squarely within that mission laid out by Trump and Musk.
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