When the Biden administration and congressional Democrats approved the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the legislative package included an idea that seemed long overdue: It directed the Treasury Department to create the IRS Direct File system to make it easier for Americans to file their tax returns at no cost, as taxpayers in many other countries already do.
It was implemented in 2024 and proved predictably popular with the public. There was no great mystery as to why: People like free things, especially when it comes to dealing with government bureaucracies they’d rather avoid anyway. The result was a program that demonstrated that the federal government can function more efficiently and make Americans’ lives a little easier.
Then the 2024 presidential election happened.
As if on cue, lobbyists for the commercial tax preparation industry asked the Trump administration to reverse course and abandon the policy. Republican officials quickly agreed and ended Direct File after a successful one-year experiment.
As Tax Day arrives this week, The New York Times’ Binyamin Appelbaum lamented the unnecessary demise of a worthwhile program.
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More affluent households are probably stuck paying for tax prep, at least as long as the tax code retains anything like its current complexity.
But there is simply no good reason that those 100 million households should have to pay to file their taxes. The government ought to regard the existence of a tax preparation industry for standard returns as a parasite on the body politic. Intuit and its rivals are collecting fees for a service that should not exist.
Appelbaum’s column added that the source code for Direct File is sitting in an online repository. “All that’s missing is an administration willing to stand up for the public interest,” he concluded.
I’d just add that all of this comes against a backdrop of a robust public conversation about affordability, inflation and Americans’ challenges with keeping up on the cost of living.
When Donald Trump and his team officially killed off the Direct File program last fall, Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia said in a written statement, “This is another corrupt decision by the Trump Administration to help corporate donors while raising costs and making life more difficult for the American people. Whether it’s raising price-hiking tariffs, cancelling infrastructure projects, driving up electricity prices, blocking attempts to lower the cost of health care, going to court to prevent hungry people from getting SNAP, or eliminating a no-cost method to file taxes, President Trump is going all out to make life less affordable for American families.”
It’s not easy for any president, even a competent one, to snap their fingers and magically reduce the cost of living, but White House teams can at least try to make a positive difference. The demise of IRS Direct File offers timely evidence that this Republican administration doesn’t want to bother.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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