There is not a single person in Ann Arbor who will not be impacted by federal funding cuts to the university. This is set to happen across our state and our country, triggering recession or worse.

by Andy Kroll

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Dave Nershi was finalizing a report he’d worked on for months when an ominous email appeared in his inbox.

Nershi had worked as a general engineer for the Internal Revenue Service for about nine months. He was one of hundreds of specialists inside the IRS who used their technical expertise — Nershi’s background is in chemical and nuclear engineering — to audit byzantine tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complex tax returns went unscrutinized. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS could recoup millions and sometimes more than a billion dollars on a single tax return.

But on Feb. 20, three months shy of finishing his probationary period and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a Navy veteran, Nershi loved working in public service and had hoped he might be spared from any mass firings. The unsigned email said he’d been fired for performance, even though he had received high marks from his manager.

As for the report he was finalizing, it would have probably recouped many times more than the low-six-figure salary he earned. The report would now go unfinished.

Nershi agreed that the federal government could be more lean and efficient, but he was befuddled by the decision to fire scores of highly skilled IRS specialists like him who, even by the logic of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, were an asset to the government. “By firing us, you’re going to cut down on how much revenue the country brings in,” Nershi said in an interview. “This was not about saving money.”

Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his billionaire top adviser Musk have launched an all-out blitz to cut costs and shrink the federal government. Trump, Musk and other administration leaders not only say the U.S. government is bloated and inefficient, but they also see it as a bastion of political opposition, calling it the “deep state.”

The strategy used by the Trump administration to reduce the size of government has been indiscriminate and far-reaching, meant to oust civil servants as fast as possible in as many agencies as possible while demoralizing the workers that remain on the job. As Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, put it in a speech first reported by ProPublica and Documented: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

One tactic used by the administration is to target probationary workers who are easier to fire because they have fewer civil service protections. Probationary, in this context, means only that the employees are new to their roles, not that they’re newbies or underperformers. ProPublica found that the latest IRS firings swept up highly skilled and experienced probationary workers who had recently joined the government or had moved to a new position from a different agency.

In late February, the Trump administration began firing more than 6,000 IRS employees. The agency has been hit especially hard, current and former employees said, because it spent 2023 preparing to hire thousands of new enforcement and customer service personnel and had only started hiring and training those workers at any scale in 2024, meaning many of those new employees were still in their probationary period. Nershi was hired as part of this wave, in the spring of last year. The boost came after Congress had underfunded the agency for much of the past decade, which led to chronic staffing shortages, dismal customer service and plummeting audit rates, especially for taxpayers who earned $500,000 or more a year.

The administration doesn’t appear to want to stop there. It is drafting plans to cut its entire workforce in half, according to reports.

Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

John Koskinen, who led the IRS from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that the widespread cuts to the IRS make no sense if Trump and Musk genuinely care about fiscal responsibility and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. “What I’ve never understood is if you’re interested in the deficit and curbing it, why would you cut back on the revenue side?” Koskinen said.

Neither the IRS nor the White House responded to requests for comment. Last month, Musk asked his followers on X, the platform he owns, whether they would “like @DOGE to audit the IRS,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service team of lawyers and engineers led by him. DOGE employees have sought to gain access to IRS taxpayer data in an attempt to “shine a light on the fraud,” according to a White House spokesman.

For this story, ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen current and former IRS employees. Most of those people worked in the agency’s Large Business and International (LB&I) division, which audits companies with more than $10 million in assets and high-income individuals. Within the IRS, the LB&I division has the highest return on investment, and the widespread cuts there put in stark relief the human and financial cost of the Trump administration’s approach to slashing government functions in the name of saving money and combating waste and fraud.

According to current and former LB&I employees, the taxpayers they audited included pharmaceutical companies, oil and gas companies, construction firms and major technology corporations, as well as more obscure private corporations and high-net-worth individuals. None of the IRS employees who spoke to ProPublica would disclose specific taxpayer information, citing privacy laws.

With the recent influx in funding, employees said, the leadership of LB&I had pushed to hire not only more revenue agents and appraisers but also specialized employees such as petroleum engineers, computer scientists and experts in corporate partnerships. These employees, usually known internally as general engineers, consulted on complicated tax returns and helped determine whether taxpayers properly claimed certain credits or other tax breaks.

This work happened in cases where major companies claimed a hefty research tax credit, which is a legitimate avenue for seeking tax relief but can also be improperly used. Highly skilled appraisers have also recouped huge savings in cases involving notorious tax schemes, such as what’s known as a syndicated conservation easement — a break abused so often that both congressional Democrats and Republicans have criticized it, while the IRS has included it on its list of the “Dirty Dozen” tax scams.

“These are cases where revenue agents don't have the technical expertise,” said one IRS engineer who is still employed at the agency and who, like other IRS employees, wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. “That’s what we do. We are working on things where expertise is absolutely necessary.”

Current and former IRS employees told ProPublica that the agency had expended a huge amount of resources to recruit and train new specialists in recent years. Vanessa Rollins, an engineer in the IRS’ Chicago office who was recently fired, said probationary employees in LB&I outnumbered full-time staffers in her office. Much of her team’s work centered on training and mentorship for the waves of new employees — most of whom were recently fired. “The entire office had been oriented around bringing us in and getting us trained,” Rollins said.

These specialists said they earned higher salaries compared with many other IRS employees. But the money these specialists recouped as a result of their work was orders of magnitude greater than what they cost. The current engineer told ProPublica that they estimated their team of less than 10 people had brought in $5 billion in adjusted tax returns over the past four years. (By contrast, a Wall Street Journal analysis published on Feb. 22 found that DOGE had found savings of $2.6 billion over the next year, far less than the $55 billion claimed by DOGE itself.)

A former LB&I revenue agent added that their work didn’t always lead to the IRS recouping money from a taxpayer; sometimes, they audited a return only to find that the taxpayer was owed more money than they had expected.

“The IRS’ mission is to treat taxpayers fairly so they pay the tax they legally owe, including making sure they’re not paying any more than legally required,” the former revenue agent said.

Notwithstanding its return on investment and the sense of duty espoused by its employees, LB&I was hit especially hard by the most recent wave of firings, employees said. According to the current IRS engineer, the Trump administration appears to have eliminated the jobs of about 120 LB&I engineers out of a total of roughly 260. The person said they had heard more terminations were expected soon. The acting IRS chief and a longtime agency leader, Doug O’Donnell, announced his retirement amid the firings.

Several LB&I employees told ProPublica that the mass layoffs had been ordered from a very high level and that several layers of managers had no idea they were coming or what to expect. The cuts, employees said, did not appear to distinguish between employees with certain specialties or performance levels, but instead focused solely on whether they were on probationary status. “It didn't matter the skill set. If they were under a year, they got cut,” another current LB&I employee told ProPublica.

The current and former IRS employees said the firings and the administration’s deferred resignation offer led to situations that have wiped out decades of experience and institutional knowledge that can’t easily be replaced. Jack McCumber was an LB&I senior appraiser in Seattle who got fired about six weeks before the end of his probationary status. He said not only did he lose his job, but the veteran appraiser who was his mentor took early retirement. McCumber and his mentor often worked on syndicated conservative easement cases that could recoup tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. “They’re pushing out the experienced people, and they’re pushing out people like me,” McCumber said. “It’s a double whammy.”

The result, employees and experts said, will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury.

“Large businesses and higher-wealth individuals are where you have the most sophisticated taxpayers and the most sophisticated tax preparers and lawyers who are attuned to pushing the envelope as much as they can,” said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner. “When those audits stop because there isn't anybody to do them, people will say, ‘Hey, I did that last year, I'll do it again this year.’”

“When you hamstring the IRS,” Koskinen added. “it’s just a tax cut for tax cheats.”

Donald Trump is planning to sign an Executive Order making English the official language of the United States. 

The president has a low opinion of other languages. Last year he told CPAC, “We have languages coming into our country. . .  they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.”

Given Trump’s commitment to “America First”—which led him to rename the Gulf of Mexico—it’s surprising that he didn’t rename English as American. 

You can watch the whole ugly episode at C-SPAN:

“You’re right now not in a very good position. You’ve allowed yourself to be in a very bad position.... You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us you start having cards.”

“What you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country, that’s backed you far more than a lot of people said they should have.”

“Your country’s in big trouble. Wait a minute — no, no. You’ve done a lot of talking. Your country is in big trouble. You’re not winning. You’re not winning this. You have a damn good chance of coming out okay because of us.”

“It’s gonna be a very hard thing to do business like this, I tell you.”

“You have to be thankful. You don’t have the cards.”

“You gotta be more thankful, because lemme tell you, you don’t have the cards. With us, you have the cards. But without us, you don’t have any cards.”

“You’re either gonna make a deal, or you’re out.”

“But you’re not acting at all thankful, and that’s not a nice thing. I’ll be honest, that’s not a nice thing.”

The only thing missing was the Mafioso-esque “Show some respect.” It’s unmistakably clear that the FFCKUS was/is looking for a pretext for abandoning Ukraine.

[Notice too the repeated references to “raw earth.” Notice too the idiot (Brian Glenn of Real America’s Voice) asking Volodymyr Zelenskyy why he doesn’t wear a suit. Notice too Zelenskyy’s eyebrows arching when the FFCKUS says that the Russian dictator respects him. Notice too Zelenskyy’s thumbs-up at 50:06 and J.D. Vance’s slap on the arm at 50:08.]

Hope begins when Democratic Party leadership gives way to the Left. Unions can make it happen.

Elon Musk, an impossibly wealthy, drug-addled Nazi sympathizer, is making drastic, devastating, unaccountable cuts to our federal government. He is making decisions of great global consequence based on nothing but his own demonstrably ignorant ideas. He is materially harming millions of people around the world. He seems to be operating outside of the law. He appears to have nothing holding back his worst impulses. The Republican Party has opened the door for him, the Democratic Party believes itself to be unable to stand in his way, and there is no indication that the courts will be able to roll back the damage he has already done. It is up to us.

As a regular person, it can seem impossible to plan and execute actions that would have a serious impact on the richest guy in America. Protesting and waving signs and calling your representatives are all things that you should do, but I know that they can often leave people feeling like their effort has not produced any real effects. You marched against the war and the war still happened. You marched against DOGE and they still defunded a bunch of cancer trials. Is any of this actually getting through to the well-insulated oligarchs?

Today, I want to point out that: Yes. There are very straightforward ways that regular people can organize and exercise leverage on Elon Musk. I will discuss one way here that you, yourself, can get involved with. The wealthier that someone gets, the more points of vulnerability their fortunes have.

What is the source of Elon Musk’s power? His wealth. There are lots of smart tech guys and there are lots of company founders and CEOs and political donors and as a group they exercise a fair amount of political influence, but the reason why this man in particular is swanning around DC doing whatever the hell he wants is that he is worth more than anyone else, and he spent more than anyone else to help get Trump elected. The way to get Elon Musk to pay attention is to target his wealth. I don’t think that he will ever be “not rich,” at least not until the revolution comes, but it is completely possible to bring about enormous losses in his net worth.

Most of Musk’s wealth comes from his ownership of companies that have become very valuable. The two biggest are SpaceX and Tesla. He owns more than 40% of SpaceX, a company that was recently valued at $350 billion, meaning that Musk’s stake is worth about $147 billion. SpaceX is a privately held company, and it is not consumer-facing, meaning its revenue is harder for regular people to affect. We’ll set aside SpaceX for now.

The other main source of Musk’s wealth is his ownership of around 13% of Tesla. That company, as of today, is worth $1.08 trillion, meaning Musk’s stake is worth about $140 billion. He also has a large number of unexercised stock options in the company. Tesla is the biggest single contributor to his net worth. It is also a public company, and one that makes its money by selling products to consumers. To regular people. Which is to say, the biggest single piece of Elon Musk’s portfolio is directly exposed to organized economic action by regular people. If you want to cost Elon Musk tens of billions of dollars, Tesla is the way to do it.

What might that look like? First, it is important to know this about Tesla’s stock price: It is insanely high. Meaning that it is much, much higher than the economic fundamentals of the company would dictate. (Which is why it has long been one of the most shorted stocks, although that trade has mostly not paid off for those who have been betting on its price to collapse for years now.) Tesla’s price-to-earnings ratio is currently 166, meaning that its stock price is 166 times the value of its earnings per share. How high is that? Well, the average PE ratio of the top 500 companies in America right now is 30—and that is high, by historic standards. The second most valuable auto company after Tesla is Toyota, which has a PE ratio of 7. General Motors also has a PE ratio of 7. What if you compare Tesla, instead, to tech companies, which investors assign a premium to? Well, the PE ratio of Apple is 39; the PE ratio of Amazon is 39; the PE ratio of Google parent Alphabet is 23. What I am saying here is that, even by giving Tesla every benefit of the doubt, the company’s stock price is irrationally high. This is well known on Wall Street. Tesla’s stock price—and by extension, the largest part of Elon Musk’s net worth—is almost purely a product of investor sentiment. It is not based so much on the company’s financial performance as on a magical belief that Musk will make it the biggest automaker in the world.

Any company whose value is this dependent not on its balance sheet but instead on a shared popular narrative is unusually vulnerable to narrative shifts. Financial history is one long demonstration of the fact that investor sentiment changes. A lot. Speculators of the sort that make up Tesla’s investors generally are like scared fish, moving tightly with the rest of the crowd, ready to swerve off in an opposite direction the moment that trouble is detected. Dampening the positive sentiment around Tesla as a brand can have a huge impact on Tesla the stock. A fortune that is built on irrational shared beliefs that can be destroyed when rationality’s cold hand creeps in. Consider the fact that if Tesla were to retreat even to a PE ratio of 40—comparable to that of big tech companies, which themselves enjoy higher PE ratios than industrial companies—that would imply a decline in the company’s value of 3/4. It would go from being a trillion-dollar company to a $250 billion company, only a bit larger than Toyota. That would represent a loss of around $100 billion in wealth for Elon Musk.

There is already a nascent protest campaign against Tesla. Its hashtag is #TeslaTakedown. It has a website. There have already been protests at Tesla dealerships across the country, and many more are planned. You can join them. In order for Tesla to make money they must attract buyers. Potential buyers can easily be turned off by having to pass protesters calling them Nazis when they go to browse for a new car. There are plenty of other cars to buy that will not get them yelled at. These things are a genuine factor in the minds of consumers.

Furthermore, we have all seen the reports of Tesla cybertrucks being defaced with swastikas or other graffiti implying that such vehicles could only be owned by Nazis. Some cybertruck owners have told reporters that they no longer want to own cybertrucks after these incidents. I would never condone illegal vandalism as a protest tactic. But as a keen observer of social trends, I observe that these types of actions often spread and become more frequent when large numbers of people view them as effective ways to achieve a goal. If owners of cybertrucks—or other Tesla products—come to find that they are frequently being made the targets of graffiti implying that they are supporting Nazis, I predict that consumer enthusiasm for purchasing Tesla products will decline. Do you really want to worry about your car being vandalized every day due to the political actions of the person who started the company? Why not just buy a different car, and save yourself that worry?

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Sure, people who share the political goals of Elon Musk and Donald Trump may continue to buy Teslas, as a way to signal their own politics. (I imagine such people already make up a significant portion of cybertruck owners). But remember: Tesla’s stock price is not a number that can be justified if Tesla’s products appeal to, at most, half of potential consumers. Tesla’s stock price can only be justified by explosive global growth in Tesla sales. If sales figures do not show that Tesla is continually getting more and more popular, its stock price cannot remain at its current elevated level, much less go even higher. Despite Tesla’s size, its stock behaves like a meme stock. And meme stocks always crash down to earth, because they do not have financial fundamentals holding them up. They only have fickle, fickle sentiment.

Tesla is not so much an auto company as a story. The story is, “Elon Musk is a genius and his genius will cause uninterrupted growth of this company, which will come to dominate the entire auto market.” If this story begins to seem less plausible, investor sentiment will get shakier. If Tesla finds itself the target of sustained protests, and if owning a Tesla begins to carry a negative social price, it is very likely that a large portion of consumers will conclude that buying a Tesla is not worth the hassle. That story of global dominance will therefore become increasingly questionable. High stock prices based on shaky sentiment are very fragile things.

I sketch all this out only to make the point that this is not anything that is out of the reach of ordinary people taking ordinary actions in line with their First Amendment rights. There are Tesla dealerships all over the country. The idea of making Elon Musk $100 billion poorer might sound like some grand dream. It is not. If you think of it only in terms of your own spending, it seems difficult: You may not buy a Tesla, but you’re only one person, and you don’t spend billions. But that is not the right way to think of it. The task is not to organize an explicit national boycott so much as it is to tarnish Tesla’s brand—by simply making clear to potential Tesla consumers that their purchase represents support for an odious political agenda. You, picketing a Tesla dealership in your town, can play a very real part in this goal. The rest is nothing more than the unfolding of the relentless math of Wall Street.

Unpopular things don’t make money.

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• Related reading: Enough Wealth to Warp the Universe; Demonize The Rich; Cars Have Fucked Up This Country Bad. Another way to have a significant impact would be to unionize Tesla, which is a topic for another day.

• You can learn more about getting involved in the Tesla Takedown campaign here. You can find a list of national protests planned for March 4 here. Want another good cause? American sign language interpreters are unionizing, and they are holding a week of action this week—you can find out how to support them right here.

• Thank you for reading How Things Work. This is an independent publication that is 100% funded by readers just like you. We run on more or less the NPR model of funding here: I don’t charge you to read this site. Instead, I say, “Hey, if you like reading this site, and you are not destitute, and you want to do your part to help keep this place alive, I ask that you become a paid subscriber.” I write for free and then hope that enough of you believe that it is worth paying for. So far, it is working, thanks to many righteous people. If you want to join them, take a second to become a paid subscriber right now. I appreciate you all.

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