I know, nobody likes the IRS. We could go into a history lesson about the GOP’s history of framing the debate in terms favorable to their own views, which led to phrases like “tax burden” and a dim view of the agency itself.

But I think we can all agree that taxes are the price of civilized society, and we need people to be the accountants of the national collective we build with those taxes. IRS agents don’t make tax laws, or determine where taxes go, or have anything to do with the process other than the collection of them and accounting for them.

But now we have a president who’s literally been convicted of falsifying his business records. For the uninitiated, that’s cheating on your taxes. I mean, his felony convictions have to do with much more than that, since he did the falsifying in order to win the 2016 election, but still. He’s got a history with the IRS.

His feelings about the Internal Revenue Service were clear to their employees in Philadelphia on Thursday, when hundreds of them were unceremoniously canned by DOGE.

An NBC report says that the Treasury Employees Union head expects a total of 400 firings, including the 300 that had already happened by the time of the report and the 100 more that were expected Thursday night. The union chief said they were “probationary workers with roughly one year or less of service at the agency.”

Robert McCabe, one such worker, summed up the feeling in the office in a way he may not have expected to do. We’ve written plenty of articles filled with the schadenfreude of watching Trump supporters get blindsided by Dear Leader’s whims. But I very rarely feel any sympathy for a Trump voter who’s hurt by the outcome of voting for Trump.

McCabe, however, seems like he genuinely was concerned with the stuff that Trump claims he’s trying to fix — the fraud and waste that would be inherent in any large system involving hundreds of millions of people.

He told NBC10 in Philadelphia that he went to work Thursday and “had issues logging in.” He said he and a coworker kind of sat there awaiting instructions, then got his layoff letter shortly before 11:30 in the morning. He told the news team that he had been a Trump supporter before the layoff:

You know when he talks about government waste and all that, yes, I’m behind it. I believe there is a lot of stuff in the government that needs fixing. And that’s part of the reason why I actually wanted to work for the government, actually. To help change. Help change the things that are wrong in the world, you know? I thought that someone with his business acumen would have come in with a fine-tooth comb and actually found it instead of coming in with a wrecking ball and destroying people’s lives for no reason.

Other than “cutting waste,” it’s not readily apparent why Trump would specifically target the IRS, especially just before tax season. The IRS has seen nearly 7% of its entire workforce eliminated so far this year.

That is, it’s not apparent until you consider the fact that under the Biden administration, the agency had been most recently tasked with finding high-wealth tax evaders in order to create an additional revenue stream — one that should have already existed, had these people not been using loopholes and sometimes fraud to escape their “tax burden,” as Republicans love to call it.

Oh, that, and the fact that the IRS workforce is made up of 65% women and 56% racial minorities. Equal opportunity misogyny and racism strikes again!

The union head mentioned earlier in this article is Alex Jay Berman, the executive vice president of the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 71. He told NBC10 that the whole thing is essentially bogus.

“The letters are willfully incorrect and to our belief in NTEU unlawful,” Berman told reporters. “They say essentially ‘your ability, skills and performance do not make you a fit for federal employment. In addition, your performance is not up to par.’ This is patently untrue. These are being all issued with the exact same wording to every single one of these probationary employees, whether they have just gotten out of training and had no performance metrics. Whether they have been here for almost their entire year and had very good performance appraisals.”

This sounds a lot like many other stories we’ve heard about federal employees getting “DOGEd.” And of course it sounds even more like the general sense that Americans are coming to about Trump’s whole vision for the way the country should be run.