Evidence shows that the much‑discussed plan to add 87,000 IRS employees under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will not happen, and that actual hiring tied to the IRA is far below that number.

• The 87,000 figure comes from a 2021 Treasury report projecting that roughly 86,852 full‑time employees could be hired over a decade if the IRS received about $80 billion in extra funding. This was always a projection, not a hard statutory hiring mandate. (politifact.com)
• The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 and related agreements cut the IRS’s IRA funding by roughly 27% (about $21 billion), immediately rescinding some enforcement and operations money and committing to further rescissions in 2024 and 2025. That materially reduced the resources available for large‑scale hiring. (taxpolicycenter.org)
• By 2024, IRS planning and public fact‑checks reported that, given the reduced funding, the agency expected to hire only about 53,000 employees from 2023–2030 with IRA money—across enforcement, operations, and taxpayer services—not 87,000. (politifact.com)
• IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel explicitly stated that the IRS was “never going to add 87,000 additional employees”, and instead aimed for a “right‑sized” workforce of around 102,500 employees by 2029, up from about 79,000 in 2022—i.e., a net increase on the order of tens of thousands, not 87,000. (federalnewsnetwork.com)
• After the 2025 change in administration, federal policy moved in the opposite direction: a federal hiring freeze and aggressive downsizing programs slashed IRS staffing, with reports of workforce reductions from roughly 100,000 employees toward 60,000–70,000 and large buyouts and layoffs. This makes any future net addition of 87,000 IRS employees not just unlikely but structurally impossible under current law and policy. (en.wikipedia.org)

Taken together, these data show that the government is on track to hire far fewer than 87,000 IRA‑funded IRS employees and that the original 87k headline will never be realized. While the shortfall is driven more by political funding cuts and subsequent workforce reductions than by an inability to find willing applicants, the outcome Chamath forecast—that the U.S. would not end up hiring the full 87,000 additional IRS employees—is correct.