Microblog Memes

Some of this is about accepting bribes. A lot more is simply ideology.

Trump's people do not believe the IRS should exist and they are trying to dismantle it. DirectFile is just low hanging fruit, intended to make people more frustrated with tax filing and more easy to radicalized in an attempt dismantle and replace with tariffs.

Like, this is a real decades long project that goes way beyond Trump. Abolishing the income tax was Goldwater's wet dream.

Not exactly.

There's still freefile (where private companies that offer tax prep software give away free access to people, usually within certain limits such as a maximum yearly income or complexity, such as only W2s, but not W2s and also investment income) but Direct File, which is where the IRS was essentially just making their own proper, standardized software to do what these private companies would, that would be entirely made for and offered by the government for free, is the thing being potentially shut down here.

US tax code is (deliberately) complicated and unlike other countries, you need to manually fill out the forms with your financial data even though the government already knows it and what you owe (minus exemptions that the vast majority of citizens won't claim). This is because there is a major industry around tax preparation, and the big names (such as Intuit) have aggressively lobbied for decades to keep the process as complicated and inconvenient as possible so that people are forced to pay them to fill out their tax forms. This lobbying has also resulted in the legally mandated free filing options being buried and hard to find, with many people not even knowing they exist.

Tax prep is a huge scam with many billions of dollars behind it. Weather providers are probably going to be next in the news, since they've been trying to kill the free government-run forecasts and force people onto their paid platforms for just as long.