The days leading up to the April 15 tax filing deadline were always going to be busy for workers at the IRS processing center near Union Station, but this year, they were particularly stressful.
The IRS is considering a downsizing that could cut as many as 20,000 employees, or 25% of its workforce, in the coming weeks. The roughly 6,000 employees in Kansas City faced agonizing choices: decide whether to accept resignation or early retirement offers by April 14 or risk losing their jobs later.
“It’s a kick in the stomach to people that are doing everything they can to meet what’s required of them,” said Shannon Ellis, a longtime IRS customer service representative and president of the union representing local workers.
By Thursday, at least 238 Kansas City workers had taken the buyout offers and were expected to leave the agency in coming weeks. Ellis noted many of those same workers had been told they were essential and required to work overtime during tax season, some seven days per week.
Their building has been overcrowded since the IRS ordered remote employees back to the office in March. Workers sometimes struggle to find open desks. Some have to bring their own ink pens and share date stamps to perform basic job functions after budget cuts have depleted supplies.
Ellis said IRS workers share the public’s disdain for taxes but understand that collecting them is necessary to support important programs like Social Security. She said she’s decided to take a “roll of the dice” and stay in her job, spurning an early retirement offer.
“I love my job,” she said. “I’m not going to let the bully force me out.
USDA: An urban food desert loses help
Urban farmer Rosie Warren grew 2,500 pounds of fruits and vegetables last year in community gardens to help feed the Ivanhoe neighborhood, where many Black families were concentrated under housing segregation policies of much of the 20th century.
Warren harvested greens, potatoes and watermelons as part of an effort to address food insecurity and health concerns in a neighborhood challenged by blight, crime and poverty. She was ecstatic last fall when the USDA awarded the neighborhood council a three-year, $130,000 grant to expand the gardens and farmers’ market serving the area.
Plans called for hiring an assistant to help Warren with growing more food and to add another market day aimed at serving more low-income older adults, mothers and children.
In February, the council received a notice terminating the grant. The USDA had determined the award “no longer effectuates agency priorities regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and activities.”
On a recent morning, Warren took a break from preparing the soil for planting to ponder the USDA’s decision.
“What do you do if you don’t support providing access to food to people who don’t have it? Wouldn’t this make your job easier?” she said. “I think it’s absurd. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Other food aid in the neighborhood has taken a hit at a time when demand is rising.
At the Bishop Sullivan Center food pantry, hundreds of low-income families are getting fewer groceries in their monthly pickups after USDA halted $500 million worth of deliveries to food banks. That included a planned order for 41,000 cases of meat, dairy and other commodities to a bank serving Kansas City.
“It just means giving families less food,” said pantry director Christopher Lowrance, who said he’s able to provide less chicken and other meat products. “It’s as simple as that.”
Public health: The city lab misses a needed upgrade
The Kansas City Health Department’s laboratory is badly in need of an upgrade, with equipment dating to when the building opened in the 1990s.
One basement space is water damaged and rarely used. Another has equipment that is so inadequate that the city has to ship samples to a state laboratory 150 miles away, causing inefficiencies, agonizing waits for results and delayed response times.
Kansas City’s health director, Dr. Marvia Jones, made it a top priority to modernize the labs this year after studying their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her agency planned to use federal funding to purchase new microscopes and testing equipment.
“That early disease detection allows you to do more rapid intervention, more rapid treatment, more rapid isolation,” she said.
But the funding for lab upgrades was abruptly eliminated last month as part of the Trump administration’s $11.4 billion cancellation of federal grants to states for public health. That news “crushed” the department’s carefully laid plans, Jones said.
Jones said the cuts, $3 million and counting for her department, mean the city will also have fewer vaccines to administer to low-income residents.
“It would be a sad shame for us to be in a worse position than we were before the pandemic,” she said. “We had processed all of our lessons learned, and then now this happens.”
Real estate: A landlord considers selling his building
Amir Minoofar was surprised when two federal agencies notified him that they planned to vacate the office building he’s owned for a decade in Overland Park, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City.
Minoofar said the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had recently agreed to extend its lease until 2029. The National Labor Relations Board, meanwhile, was paying month to month.
Minoofar said the government initially notified him the agencies would be out of the building in August, part of a DOGE-led blitz of hundreds of lease cancellations that has been marked by errors and subsequent reversals.
In the Kansas City metropolitan area, the government is moving to cancel 10 leases totaling 219,000 square feet that cost more than $4 million in annual rent, according to DOGE’s online “Wall of Receipts.”
Minoofar said he was more recently told the agencies will likely have to stay past August and their departure date is now unclear. He said he may have to sell the building, which has an appraised value of $2.9 million, and take a loss because of the difficult office market.
But he said he understands why the government would unload the space, which he said has often been sparsely used since the rise of telework during the pandemic.
“Businesswise, it makes sense for government to cut costs,” he said. “A lot of people are going to be unhappy but it’s a huge gigantic family and they need to take care of it. You cannot keep everybody happy.”
Tesla: Elon Musk’s car company faces a statewide campaign
With liberal anger growing at Musk’s role in the government, protesters have gathered Saturdays outside his Tesla dealership in Kansas City to denounce the cuts.
State records show Tesla sales there have dropped amid calls for a boycott. Now, enough voter anger could even force the business to close.
Organizers of a newly launched “Unplug Musk” initiative are seeking to use democracy to strike at the world’s richest man by changing state law to ban car manufacturers from selling directly to consumers.
They say they plan to soon begin gathering the 111,000 signatures of registered voters that they would need to put the change on the statewide ballot in November 2026. If approved by voters, it would force the closure of the Tesla showrooms in Kansas City and St. Louis.
Missouri’s governor, Republican Mike Kehoe, a former auto dealer himself, sponsored a 2014 bill when he was a state senator aimed at requiring manufacturers like Tesla to sell through local dealers. The bill passed the Senate but died in the House after Tesla lobbied against it. The referendum revives that plan.
“There’s not a soul in this country who’s against trying to weed out government inefficiency but just taking a chain saw to people’s lives and their health care is a ridiculous way to achieve that. And it is going to cause some devastating impacts,” said organizer Brad Ketcher, a prominent Democrat and lawyer who helped draft the state’s 2022 marijuana legalization referendum.
The administration’s response: Temporary hardship
An HHS spokesperson said the agency’s downsizing, including cutting jobs and consolidating divisions, would save money and make the organization more efficient. As for the $11.4 billion in grant funding cuts, the spokesperson said, “HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a nonexistent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”
The IRS has offered a similar rationale for its downsizing, saying it is making process improvements that will ultimately more efficiently serve the public.
Musk said last year that Trump’s budget cuts would cause a “temporary hardship” that would soon put the economy on stronger footing.
One local economic researcher said it remained unclear just how deep that hardship will be in Kansas City, including whether it will just slow growth or cause population losses.
“It’s a big burden that’s being placed on a narrow group of people,” said Frank Lenk, director of the Office of Economic Development at the Mid-America Regional Council, a nonprofit of city and county governments in the Kansas City region. “It will definitely take some of the steam out of the local economy.”
Trump has credited DOGE with helping end “the flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars,” saving billions to help improve the nation’s finances.
The White House didn’t respond to questions about Kansas City. But Trump said recently he would invite the Kansas City Chiefs to the White House to make up for a 2020 Super Bowl victory celebration that was canceled during the pandemic.
Associated Press writer Heather Hollingsworth contributed to this report.
