The Government Still Found Us

We never leave the house that much other than to go pickup groceries or Doctor appt..

Being senior citizens and trying to watch our budget on a fixed income we stay home.

We did not make a bad investment. We did not break a law. We did not miss a deadline on purpose. We did not buy anything we could not afford or sign anything we did not read. We sat at home, in Lexington, Kentucky, and tried to do the right things the right way.

And the government found us anyway.

Here is what this week looked like from the inside.

Our federal tax return was rejected. The reason — an AGI mismatch. The IRS uses your prior year adjusted gross income as a security verification. If the number you enter does not match the number they have on file, the door does not open. No explanation of what the right number is. No guidance. Just rejected. We had to dig out our 2024 return, find line 11, and enter that exact number — fourteen thousand five hundred and twenty nine dollars — before the system would let us through.

Our Kentucky state return was rejected separately for a different reason. A FEIN mismatch on the LLC filing. Two different systems. Two different locks. Neither one told us what it needed until we failed to provide it.

Then the account number on file did not match. Then the PIN.

Four walls. All invisible until we walked into them face first.

And sitting on top of all of that — a trademark application for The Faust Baseline filed with the USPTO. Seven hundred dollars invested. A security log jam on their end caused processing delays that we had no part in creating. The response window closed. The application moved toward abandonment. Now it costs us another hundred and fifty dollars just to petition to get back in the door — to fight a problem their system caused.

We never left the house.

Now here is the part that connects all of it. Because this did not happen by accident.

The IRS workforce has fallen from 102,113 workers to 75,702 over the past year. Fortune A quarter of the agency gone. IRS concluded its return processing, customer service and other functions would enter filing season undertrained or understaffed, which could lead to processing errors and poor customer service and ultimately harm taxpayers. GovExec

That is not my opinion. That is the government’s own watchdog saying it out loud.

We are just not able to provide timely service to people Bloomberg Government — those are the words of an IRS union chapter president in Iowa. Not a politician. Not a commentator. Someone on the inside watching it happen.

DOGE came through the IRS like a wrecking ball. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency pushed mass resignations, buyouts, and workforce reductions across the agency. Most of the employees took the fork in the road resignation offer from DOGE rather than waiting to get laid off. Fortune The people who knew how to help you — the trained customer service representatives, the tax attorneys, the people who could actually answer your question when you called — left. And the agency began scrambling to refill positions it had just emptied.

Those cuts included 17% to 19% of key IRS functions for the filing season. CNBC The people answering your calls. The people processing your returns. The people who were supposed to catch errors before they became your problem.

They were gone before tax season started.

And it is not just the IRS. The USPTO — the Patent and Trademark Office — has faced its own version of the same institutional thinning. Systems that were already aging, running on infrastructure that was never designed for modern volume, now operating with fewer qualified hands to keep them running. When their security system creates a log jam that costs an independent publisher seven hundred dollars and a missed deadline, that is not a glitch. That is what happens when you strip an institution of its capacity and tell ordinary people the system still works fine.

It does not work fine. We are the proof of that.

I am seventy one years old. I have been dealing with government agencies my entire adult life. I remember when you could call the IRS and reach someone who knew what they were talking about. Someone who could actually look at your file and tell you what the problem was. I remember when a filing system rejection came with enough information to fix it. I remember when the process, while never easy, was at least navigable by an ordinary person without a law degree.

That is not nostalgia talking. That is observation. Something changed. Something was deliberately changed.

The idea behind the cuts was efficiency. The word they used was waste. Cut the waste. Shrink the government. Make it leaner. Run it like a business.

What they actually did was cut the people. The trained, experienced, institutional knowledge people who knew how the system worked and could help you navigate it. You cannot replace twenty five years of IRS experience with an AI chatbot and a reduced budget. You cannot run a system that touches every American family every year on skeleton staffing and call it modernization.

What you get instead is four rejected returns and a trademark application bleeding toward abandonment and a retired couple in Kentucky sitting at a kitchen table wondering what they did wrong.

We did not do anything wrong.

That is the point. That is the whole point.

The cost of dismantling a functional institution is not paid by the people who dismantled it. It is paid by ordinary people trying to do ordinary things correctly. Filing their taxes. Protecting their intellectual property. Running a small LLC that earned zero dollars last year and still had to navigate three separate government systems just to prove it.

Every dollar this cost us — in time, in stress, in filing fees, in petition fees — is a direct transfer from our pocket to the consequence of someone else’s policy decision.

We never bought anything. We never went anywhere. We sat at home and tried to do the right thing.

And it cost us anyway.

That is what the dismantling of government capacity looks like from the inside. Not on a policy paper. Not in a congressional hearing. At a kitchen table in Lexington, Kentucky, on a Tuesday morning in April, with a stack of rejected notices and a trademark on the edge of abandonment and a woman who spent four days convinced the problem was a missing Schedule E.

It was not a missing form. It was a missing system. One that used to work and was taken apart piece by piece by people who will never sit at our kitchen table and feel what we felt this week.

I am not done fighting. The returns got filed. The trademark petition is next. We will figure it out the way we always have — carefully, stubbornly, one problem at a time.

But I wanted you to know what it looks like when the government you pay into stops being able to serve the people who fund it.

It looks like us. Sitting at home. Never leaving. And still getting found.

“A Working AI Firewall Framework”

“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack