Internal Revenue Service employees are being offered a last opportunity to accept a voluntary buyout offer as the Supreme Court blocked a ruling requiring the Treasury Department and other federal agencies to rehire thousands of fired probationary employees.

The IRS sent a memo to employees announcing a reduction in force and offering employees three voluntary separation programs, according to a copy of the memo that was posted Tuesday to Reddit. Under the Treasury Deferred Resignation Program, the Treasury is offering a second and final deferred resignation program with applications accepted Monday, April 7, 2025, through Monday, April 14, 2025.  The TDRP 2.0 program will mirror the benefits of the original deferred resignation program including paid administrative leave through Sept. 30, 2025. Employees who elect this program will have to offboard no later than Sept. 30, 2025, unless they choose to offboard sooner. 

The IRS is also offering a Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment program to eligible employees, but they will have to depart no later than May 31, 2025, and administrative leave will not be offered to VSIP participants. Employees can elect to resign, optionally retire or take a combination of VSIP plus another program, Voluntary Early Retirement Application, or VERA. Employees who enroll in either the DRP or VSIP can also elect VERA, but they need to be at least 50 years old and have at least 20 years of creditable federal service, or be of any age with at least 25 years of creditable federal service, to be eligible for VERA. 

Last week, after two court rulings in California and Maryland, the IRS’s acting commissioner, Melanie Krause, announced the IRS would be bringing back approximately 7,000 probationary employees who had been fired and then put on paid administrative leave. However, last Friday, the IRS eliminated its Office of Civil Rights and Compliance, laying off approximately 130 employees, while also making plans to eliminate around 20,000 employees, or almost a quarter of its workforce.

“As we announced on Friday, the IRS has begun implementing a Reduction in Force (RIF) that will result in staffing cuts across multiple offices and job categories,” said the IRS memo.

Separately on Tuesday, the Supreme Court issued an order pausing the ruling from the California court ordering the Trump administration to rehire over 16,000 probationary employees who had been fired at the Treasury Department, as well as the Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior  and Veterans Affairs Departments, according to The New York Times. The Supreme Court indicated that the nine nonprofit groups that had filed suit did not have sufficient standing. However, the court ruling in Maryland remains in effect. 

The Times and Fox News also reported that the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security have reached an agreement to share IRS information on immigrants with DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Under the memorandum of understanding, ICE would be able to ask the IRS for information such as addresses of people who have been ordered to leave the U.S.  IRS officials had previously objected to sharing more extensive information such as Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers and the disagreement reportedly led to the departure of the IRS’s former acting chief counsel. 

President Donald Trump rejected a European Union proposal to drop tariffs on all bilateral trade in industrial goods with the U.S., meaning that his 20% tariff on all EU imports is due to come into force Wednesday. 

Speaking at the White House on Monday, Trump said the offer from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is not enough to reset the transatlantic trading relationship, accusing the EU of maintaining other barriers to trade.

“The European Union has been very bad to us,” he said. “We’re paying them to guard them militarily and they are screwing us on trade, so that’s not a good combination.”

EU trade officials have been trying to calibrate their response to the U.S. tariff proposals, seeking to project a degree of firmness and also to avoid escalation.

The EU plans to begin consulting with member states and industry early next week on how it plans to retaliate against the across-the-board tariffs, along with levies targeting the auto industry.

Olof Gill, a commission spokesman, said Tuesday that the bloc’s executive arm plans to discuss its response before coming up with a final set of measures to be voted on at a later date by member states.

On Monday, the commission dropped plans for a 50% retaliatory tariff on American whiskey as part of a separate dispute over Trump’s decision last month to put levies on aluminum and steel imports. The initial list targeted some €22 billion ($24.1 billion) in products, before a few categories were removed.

Instead, the bloc’s executive arm is proposing tariffs on a selection of U.S. goods that includes diamonds, motorcycles, pleasure boats, household appliances, safety glass, playing cards, tobacco, poultry and other agricultural products. 

Most face a 25% tariff, but a few would be hit with a 10% rate, according to a document seen by Bloomberg. Several member states had pushed for whiskey to be excluded after Trump threatened to introduce a 200% tariff on European wine and champagne producers in response. 

Earlier, von der Leyen noted the EU has previously offered to zero out tariffs on industrial products, including autos, if the U.S. does the same, but that Washington hasn’t engaged.

Now, Europeans are struggling to prevent the dispute spinning out of control, with the U.S. singling out the EU and China as two of the main targets of his trade policy. 

Trump on Monday promised to impose an additional 50% tariff on Chinese imports on top of two separate levies — of 34% and 20% — that he’d already announced after Beijing announced that it would retaliate. Those new levies are also due to kick in on Wednesday. 

In his comments on Monday, Trump railed against European trade policy, asserting that the EU has blocked access to U.S. cars and agricultural products, and demanding that European countries buy more energy from the U.S. 

The EU “was formed to really do damage to the U.S. on trade, that’s the reason it was formed,” Trump said, who repeated his complaints that the U.S. has been paying for Europe’s defense since other NATO allies haven’t been spending enough on defense.

Even so, Trump hasn’t been specific about what kind of concessions he’s looking for, and EU officials have struggled to engage with their U.S. counterparts. Von der Leyen has yet to meet with Trump since he took office.

EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic suggested he’s open to discussing non-tariff issues as the U.S. has demanded, as long as there’s a mutual benefit for both sides. But he said that the value-added tax, which Trump has criticized, is an important source of income for member states and the EU won’t change this system.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Bloomberg Television on Monday that he doesn’t expect any deals with countries before the higher tariffs kick in on Wednesday.

EU trade ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Monday to formulate their response signaled readiness to deploy a full spectrum of countermeasures including potential taxes on U.S. tech companies in response to the sweeping tariffs that have tipped global markets into freefall since Trump announced them. 

“If we can’t find an agreement we also have measures available,” Jens Spahn, a German conservative who is one of the frontrunners to be economy minister in the next government, said Tuesday in an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio. “I would mention the taxation of digital companies — Amazon, Meta, Apple — all of those present. It’s a clear indication of what we can also do.”

Some $10 trillion has been wiped off the value of global equities since Trump’s Rose Garden presentation last week with investors pricing in fears that the escalating trade war will trigger a global recession.

BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink said Monday that most CEOs he talks to think the U.S. is already in a recession, warning that stock markets could decline further as Trump destabilizes the global economy. 

In Luxembourg, all 27 EU members backed the commission’s approach to negotiate and prepare countermeasures if talks fail, giving the commission a solid mandate to move ahead with its plan, senior EU diplomats said.

“While the EU remains open and prefers negotiations, we will not wait endlessly,” Sefcovic told reporters.

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris says he is open to the creation of a new 40% tax bracket for those earning $1 million or more, lending credence to an idea Republicans are considering as a way to offset some new tax cuts.

Harris said in an interview on Monday that he views the millionaires’ tax rate as a “reasonable way to pay for” President Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to eliminate levies on tipped wages. 

“You are only raising it a couple of points,” the Maryland Republican added. The current top tax rate is 37% for individuals earning more than $626,350 a year.

Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, also said that he’d consider letting the top rate spring back to 39.6% — the highest bracket before Trump’s first-term cuts — as long as there were some parameters around it, particularly for owners of privately held companies that pay their business taxes on their household returns.

The openness to a new 40% tax bracket for millionaires comes after decades of Republicans opposing any form of tax increase. But the GOP under Trump has grown more populist, allowing some lawmakers to back away from the party’s long-held stance that tax cuts for top earners and corporations are a prime way to energize the economy.

Congress is seeking to pass an extension of Trump’s first-term overhaul, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, in the coming months. That bill faced a backlash when it passed in 2017 for skewing many of the benefits to large corporations and high-earning Americans.

Republicans are considering a series of new tax cuts, including eliminating taxes on overtime pay and creating new write-offs for older people and car buyers. But fiscal constraints in the legislation mean that lawmakers will have to find either spending reductions or tax increases to offset the cost of their tax priorities.

Harris leads the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, which has several dozen members. The group, which has not taken a public position on a 40% millionaire tax rate, is an influential voting bloc and has the power to block legislation in the House given the Republican Party’s narrow margins in the chamber.

The House as soon as this week could vote on a budget resolution that unlocks the process for Republicans to pass a tax cut bill on GOP votes alone.