The Internal Revenue Service is in the process of terminating more than 6,000 employees,

around 6% of the agency's overall workforce.

It comes as Elon Musk's team, known as the Department of Government Efficiency,

continues its efforts to cut the federal workforce.

Our White House correspondent Laura Barone Lopez has more.

Laura.

Omna, these firings come in the middle of tax filing season and target relatively recent hires.

Experts warn that this change will hurt the IRS's ability to investigate ultra-wealthy who are evading

taxes. Today, in a New York Times opinion piece, former IRS commissioners who served under

both Democratic and Republican

presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, called the mass layoffs a mistake.

They write that the firings, quote, will shift the burden of funding the government from people

who shirk their taxes to the honest people who pay them. And they added that it will impede

efforts by the IRS to simplify the tax

filing process for everyone. To discuss, I'm joined by one of the authors, Daniel Werfel, former

commissioner of the IRS who resigned last month more than two years earlier than expected. Mr. Riffel,

thank you so much for joining us. Good to be here. An IRS commissioner from every administration, essentially from Ronald Reagan to present, signed

on to this op-ed.

Why do you see these layoffs as a mistake?

Well, we got together as former commissioners, and we tried to understand why this was being

undertaken.

And we understood that it was being undertaken in the interest of

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