Trump, DOGE, and an Army of Lobbyists: Why Doing Your Taxes Just Got Harder

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Don Moynihan

“Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society” according to Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.. But the billions of hours and hundreds of billions of dollars Americans spend on tax reporting are the price we pay for a dysfunctional government unwilling to invest in public interest capacity.

In addition to tariff- and war-induced inflation, Americans can also thank President Trump for allowing this time tax to grow. Trump killed Direct File, a free tax reporting option that IRS had built. Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times summed up how I and a lot of other people who care about government services feel:

He has destroyed things that are more important than Direct File, but this one sticks in my craw. It was a straightforward way to make life a little better for a lot of Americans. It was a step toward the kind of easy-to-use, efficient, high-tech government services that everyone claims to want. It worked. And now it’s gone.

What Appelbaum is pointing out that Direct File is not just about whether you save some money at tax time. It is also about whether American government can deliver modern public services in a digital age. One member of the Direct File team I spoke to noted their initial surprise to learn that the U.S. was lagging so far behind other countries when it came to digital tax reporting:

https://www.lincolnsquare.media/p/trump-doge-and-an-army-of-lobbyists