How does removing an easy tax filing solution improve government efficiency? It seems like a handout to private tax preparers.
I've scanned some of the DOGE stuff and the fact that I have seen pretty much no mention or discussion of the big budget items: social security, military, medicare, and medicaid does not make me optimistic that this is going to do anything about government spending...
> How does removing an easy tax filing solution improve government efficiency? It seems like a handout to private tax preparers.
it doesn't, the purpose of DOGE isn't to "improve government efficiency", it's a random company being allowed to take over portions of the actual government.
also, killing Direct File is an explicit ask from the H&R Block etc and their lobbyists, since they'll lose business if filing taxes becomes easier. they also oppose any genuine attempt to make the tax system itself more sensible for the same reason.
> How does removing an easy tax filing solution improve government efficiency?
It doesn't. This is a corporate takeover of key government functions. This is just one small part of the plan.
Phase 1, which we're in now is to blame everything on bad governance.
Phase 2 is to say: 'business' can fix it and auction off the US government. Schools, the Post Office, Social Security, elements of law enforcement, and much more.
Phase 3: Read Balaji's "The Network State". TLDR: It will be to give corporations state power, including but not limited to owning and passing laws on their land, and having their own enforcement police/military.
> It seems like a handout to private tax preparers
the entire premise of the Trump administration is to hand out the fed'gov to large companies and the hyper-wealthy. is this really that much of a surprise?
"Of the $13.0 million spent on pilot development and implementation, $10.6 million is technology and product development costs and $2.4 million is operational costs (customer service, cloud computing, user
authentication, etc.)"
"Nearly half of Direct File users reported paying for tax preparation last year, and the Treasury Department estimates that Direct File users saved $5.6 million in tax preparation fees"
It should be expected that the government has a cost to provide for citizens to meet their tax obligations easily, efficiently, and without a private party involved or necessary.
> Not for nothing, but Direct File by the IRS was one of the best things the USG has done in years — it allowed millions of Americans to stop paying predatory fees to TurboTax. The literal only people who oppose it are TurboTax lobbyists.
I think Direct File is great, but where is the $200 assumption coming from? A lot of the people using direct file (which is quite basic) were probably using free filing solutions or ones much less than $200.
thanks for the reply. the $200 is a rounding down from $220 for the average fee cost for a 1040 in 2021 according to the national society of accountants.
the second link in my earlier comment provides much more direct data, estimating $5.6 million in tax preparation fees saved compared to operation costs of $2.4 million. i've updated my original comment now to remove my personal estimate.
And you have to remember it was only starting to ramp up. The cost per taxpayer would be expected to go down as the program moved from development & scale-up to being the standard solution.
Not really familiar with costs at this scale, I'm interested to see HN's take on whether this is considered cheap or expensive compared to other federal projects (both contracted and in-house).
My naive view is that this was a genuinely useful effort being wasted and an operational cost of $2.4M _looks_ like a steal, but would appreciate better comparison from people more informed than me.
FYI the issue of free tax filing — including opposing TurboTax's lobbying efforts to kill it — has been a fairly popular topic on HN, to the tune of thousands of upvotes over the years:
To be clear, no indication that the program itself has been cut. I tried to be specific in my title that the team was disbanded, not that it's been taken offline.
That said, it's clear from this tweet that Musk views this program as a bad one. So I'm definitely concerned a good effort will be lost.
The 18F team who works for GSA, is not part of the IRS, and was not the only group that worked on the IRS Direct file program. USDS and Treasury also worked on it.
I think it's really creepy and sad that this guy uses language like "This group has been deleted" when he's talking about people and not rows in a database.
Unlike most here, I've been cautiously optimistic about DOGE. I know, I know... But this seems like an absolute mistake, unless the administration really is planning on eliminating the income tax altogether. Filing income taxes in the US is such an enormous waste of time every year, and direct file seemed like we were finally moving in a better direction... sigh
I was (and still am) pretty centrist in my views, but this administration and the complicit Legislators and Supremes stepped over a line that I never expected to see in my lifetime.
Time will tell. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of DOGE, and I was well aware of those reasons prior to this action. I think most people agree that fat needs to be trimmed; we disagree about how the trimming should happen. All the hand wringing and gnashing of teeth seemed (and still seems) to me to be overblown, but we will see.
Medicare and Medicaid is the single biggest cost--it's quite large in fact--but paying for the actual services (private services) is where the bulk of the costs comes from.
The actual fat is private industry over-charging and over-billing Medicare and Medicaid, but this is the same parasitic problem that we see in private health care in the US.
Why? Because of regulatory capture and lobbying by the health lobby; the same lobbyists who also double-dip by having both employers pay for the plans as well as having the insured pay out of pocket through "high deductibles".
This is the "fat" that MAGA politicians refuse to touch, because they're just as corrupt as every other politician in the so called swamp.
PS I doubt you'll see this, but I've been meaning to respond for some time now.
> I think most people agree that fat needs to be trimmed; we disagree about how the trimming should happen.
It feels like you're falling for the Politician's Fallacy here ("Something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done."). You're right that there's broad agreement that the fat needs to be trimmed, but that doesn't make DOGE a good idea, and I don't think we've heard anything about them that isn't terrible, illegal, or both.
Direct File is still fully functional and supported for use in 25 states this year.
Even if it were removed in the near future, as long as it's up, you can be confident that your tax info will be handled properly, as it uses the same interface for tax submissions as all the existing third party tax filing software.
I have to imagine Intuit and HR Block paid millions to get this done. You have to be in a cult to in some way align a simple and free way of filing taxes with "far-left" wokeness.
The actual story is that Musk claims he deleted a group (18F) that assisted the IRS (among others) with the creation of the tax filing program. The group is (was) part of GSA.
The flagged/dead army is out here in full force, but we're watching Elon Musk, Garry Tan who owns this website, YC alumni/notorious sociopaths like Austen Allred, and associates dismantling the government and effectuating, promoting, calling for, cheering a revolution.
If you want to know what's going on with flags and these stories on HN, I've written quite a bit about it over the last couple days. There's a shorter version at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922234 and two longer ones at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 (including a later reply). If you (or anyone) read those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
The problem with heavy-handed moderating, rather than relying on upvotes/downvotes/flags, is that it is more subject to bias. I'm happy to stipulate that bias didn't play a role here -- I googled around and your reputation in this space is quite high! -- but it's also unknowable.
Btw, I'm pretty confident this getting removed from the front page before it was flagged wasn't "imaginary."
The post fell off the front page because it set off the flamewar detector and also was flagged by lots of users. Moderators turned those penalties off after a while.
(What I called imaginary was attributing HN outcomes to Elon, Garry, or Austen Allred (?!))
I'm not sure what heavy-handed moderating you might be referring to but if you want to mention some specific examples, I can try to respond. Mostly what people are complaining about right now is that mods aren't overriding user flags actively enough, so your comment seems a bit counter-trend (which is fine!)
Personally I am inclined to flag any link to X, but especially any link to an Elon Musk post.
I'd have no problem with the content if it was in the mainstream media or some kind of analysis on a blog.
My own taxes are crazy because my wife runs a riding academy, we have a rental house, etc.
My son was a candidate for the 1040EZ back in the day (he only had a W-2) but Direct File was an unmitigated disaster for him last year because he had trouble creating an account, probably because he'd never filed a tax return.
While we were on the phone trying to get support (we put it off too long) I was able to download the 1040 and the corresponding form from New York and we filled it out, hung up, and mailed it the next day.
I often find primary sources of news more interesting than analysis that mostly summarizes widely-known facts. Nothing against, say, The Verge -- but their article about this will probably just summarize things folks here already know about the program. I also don't think, for example, linking here is a better experience for HN: https://www.rawstory.com/elon-musk-irs-easy-filing/ or the right wing version: https://nypost.com/2025/02/03/us-news/elon-musk-claims-far-l...
And with traditional news outlets, sometimes they make it impossible to find the actual primary source because they refuse to hyperlink things (though the Verge is good about that).
Then again, if the entire front page were X links, I'd find that less interesting than more thoughtful, longer analysis. So I agree and disagree.
My take is that POSSE [1] is the way to go. (Though I really should get back to blogging to prove my commitment)
Big F Federation in the Fediverse is less important in my mind than the small-f federation that I see something cool on Mastodon I should be able to link to it from Bluesky or Threads or whatever. The notifications and all that are just the cherry on top.
The principled reason to "never link to X" is that X will suppress your visibility if you link out of X. If X punishes you from linking to an HN discussion I think HN shouldn't be linking back to X. The same holds true for Facebook, Threads and Instagram, though it is unusual for someone to get the idea that the HN audience would care about any content on those sites.
I think it is more complicated than that. I think many of them feel obligated to maintain their professional relationships and not threaten them by allowing too much "counter revolutionary" content to appear on this platform.
