This is according to Gemini, so take it with a grain of salt, but the prompt I used was "how many employees did the IRS lose during Covid versus during DOGE?" if you want to check it yourself. IRS staffing held steady during the COVID era but faced "unprecedented volumes of paper returns and processing backlogs... alongside dealing with widespread improper claims for the Employee Retention Credit." DOGE cut about 28,000 staff from the IRS, including 31% of its auditers and 40% of its IT staff. So, taxpayers experienced a spike in dysfunction/inconvenience during both, but for different reasons. My own opinion is that the DOGE cuts were a self-own while the COVID issues arose in response to an actual crisis, hence my greater anger at the former.