KUER0%
Utah tuvo recorte federal del 11%, y el IRS vuelve a contratar en Ogden 28%
By Macy Lipkin0%
6/19/2026, 1:07:36 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 28 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Appeal to Authority, and Appeal to Emotion, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 36.7% saturation with 252 hits. Analysis detected 1,527 faulty-reasoning hits from 687 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 39% and a BS Rank of 28% (15,769 of 21,886 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 72.00% of the article peer group.
You can find an English-language version of the story here.
The Internal Revenue Service is — once again — hiring.
The agency is looking to fill 850 positions in Ogden and will hold events on June 22 and 23.
Even if it manages to fill all the positions, there will be fewer staff than when President Donald Trump returned to office and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, drastically cut the agency.
Overall, Utah’s federal civilian workforce was 11% smaller in April 2026 than it was in January 2025, according to the Utah Department of Workforce Services.
Data from the U.S.
Office of Personnel Management shows the Department of the Treasury had the largest loss.
It’s down by 1,660 workers, or 20%.
With the exception of a few, all Treasury employees in Utah work for the IRS, which has a processing center in Ogden and, until 2024, was the largest employer in Weber County.
Robert Lawrence, speaking as president of the local chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union, said the IRS needs the new hires.
But he noted those hires wouldn’t be necessary if the agency hadn’t cut more than 20,000 positions nationwide.
“I’m a professional, so I can’t really say how I feel about it, but I think the professional term I’d like to use is completely inefficient and a waste of money and time,” he said.
Now, he added, the government will have to invest in training new people and institutional knowledge is lost.
Meanwhile, the remaining staff is overloaded.
“Tax returns are piling up so high right now and they’ve had to move people, for example from our IT (information technology) and HR (human resources) departments, people who don’t do taxes, and train them to do taxes,” he said.
Also, to keep people in their jobs, he said supervisors are denying medical requests to work from home and won’t let employees take time off they’ve earned.
“The IRS is doing what it thinks it can to keep people in their jobs, but it’s a very toxic environment,” he said.
Some workers are afraid to leave the building to eat at local restaurants or feel nervous about spending money generally because they worry about losing their jobs.
Many of those who retired or took buyouts have yet to receive payments, Lawrence said.
He considers all of this to have a negative impact on the economy.
After the Treasury, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior had the largest federal employee losses in Utah, though on a much smaller scale, between about 140 and 250 in each agency.
Nate Lloyd, director of economic research at the Kem C.
Gardner Policy Institute, said it’s true the state feels a disproportionate impact when federal jobs are cut, because a larger-than-average share of its workforce is made up of federal government civilians.
“It doesn’t just affect them, it affects our economy, because they might have to move out of state to find a new job,” he said.
“And maybe some found something here and stayed, but still, they might have found something that pays less.”
On average, federal government jobs pay about $19,000 more per year than private sector jobs in Utah, according to the Gardner Institute.
Those who stay and struggle to find work might have trouble paying rent or utilities, and they might cut back on spending at local restaurants and shops.
But the impacts are unlikely to be noticed beyond that, Lloyd said, partly because other sectors have grown enough that Utah’s economy continues to generate jobs.
And the impact isn’t evenly distributed, Lloyd added, because there were more federal cuts in some parts of the state than others.
Weber County was where the most federal workers left their jobs, followed by Salt Lake County.
Macy Lipkin is a member of Report for America and works for KUER in northern Utah.
This report was translated by artificial intelligence and edited by Edgar Zúñiga, of Avanza 88.3, Utah’s first bilingual public radio station.
Speakers
7speakers63%attributed speech256writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageRobert Lawrence
211 attributed words49% of attributed speech69% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.