Acting or Vacant: The New Status Quo for Leadership Roles at IRS

Top jobs at the IRS in the Trump administration generally have two forms in 2025: vacant or acting.

Roughly 30 jobs make up the top brass organizational chart at the agency. Of those, nine are vacant and 11 are filled by employees in an acting capacity—chief among them the IRS commissioner, now on its seventh leader with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. He took over after President Donald Trump ousted his own pick for the top job, Billy Long, last week.

One acting commissioner, Gary Shapley, lasted less than a week after a dispute among administration officials.

The unprecedented turnover obscures who’s in charge at the agency and raises worries among taxpayers and practitioners, some of whom wonder whether the IRS will be able to get anything done at all as the next tax season approaches.

The current top lineup is a nearly new slate of leaders from the start of this year. Trump’s efforts to shrink the government paired with what some top officials viewed as divisive actions by the administration led to an exodus of leaders. The IRS workforce will drop by about a quarter to roughly 75,000 employees this year.

Other leaders didn’t get the choice to stay.

Traci DiMartini, once the head of the human resources department, was among the first to be put administrative leave earlier this year. Holly Paz, the commissioner of Large Business and International Division, and Elizabeth Kastenberg, acting director of the Office of Professional Responsibility, were put on leave while the IRS investigates their unspecific alleged conduct against Republicans. Karen Howard, the executive director of online services, Robert Choi, the leader of tax-exempt and government entities division, and Bridget Roberts, the chief of the Direct File program, also were put on leave weeks later.

The graphic below shows key leadership changes and vacancies in the last several months.

Interactive Graphic: A wave of removals of top IRS officials leaves critical roles unfilled.