OPINION:
After Tax Day, signs are encouraging that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is preparing to take the ax to one onerous idea that would make a bad day even worse. Championed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and left-wing, dark money special interest groups such as Arabella Advisors, funded by the billionaire class she claims to revile, “Direct File” is a government-run tax filing service empowering Washington to calculate and enforce what each taxpayer owes.
The program is a blatant conflict of interest because the government relies on tax dollars to survive. It’s akin to a defendant facing a judge and jury who are the same person. Or if a pitcher and an umpire conspired to call every pitch a strike against a batter who never stood a chance.
To borrow a Warren phrase, it’s a rigged system.
The federal government is a greedy beast, and its food of choice is your hard-earned tax dollars. With a duplicative, costly and potentially illegal program, Ms. Warren is creating a vehicle to gobble up more money while ignoring the underlying problem: the density of our tax code.
Let’s unpack the problems with Direct File.
First, it is duplicative. A free tax filing program already exists for 70% of Americans. “Free File” is a public-private partnership that provides access to tax preparation software free of charge for those eligible.
Second, it is costly. A recent report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the official watchdog for the Internal Revenue Service, found that the $24.6 million obligated for the initial pilot program failed to include an additional $8.8 million of overrun, putting the final price tag at more than $30 million. The higher IRS estimates range from $64 million to $249 million annually.
That means that each of the 140,803 taxpayers who used Direct File in 2024 cost more than $1,500. As with everything in government, there is no free lunch. It’s just a matter of the form of the final bill.
Third, Direct File is illegal. Congress never passed its authorization. The 2022 “Inflation Reduction Act” allocated $15 million, less than half of what has already been spent, for a study examining its feasibility, not the outright construction or implementations.
Naturally, Ms. Warren and Direct File’s backers are unconcerned with facts that counter their narrative. Some of the loudest champions of the project have been candid about the real motivations. One former Warren staffer connected to left-wing billionaires championing the program called Direct File “one of the best tools we have to create the infrastructure for guaranteed income in this country.”
Talk about acknowledging the quiet part out loud. Long a pipe dream of the hard left, universal income schemes involve financial handouts from the government, whose amounts and recipients are, you guessed it, determined by the government. Far from the utopia framed by its supporters, universal income is a euphemism for socialism, where the fate, well-being and finances of a citizenry are handed to the government.
The American tax code is complicated and needs reform, as millions remember tearing out their hair ahead of the April 15 deadline. It should not require countless hours and reams of confusing forms for law-abiding taxpayers to complete the annual rite.
If the Trump administration revived its first-term pledge to shrink the tax form to the size of a postcard, it would be welcome news.
That’s not Ms. Warren’s goal. Her agenda is to give Washington more power and more money. She wants everyone to pay their “fair share,” a code word for higher taxes, and she is pushing a government program to achieve that goal. Ms. Warren has never met a tax hike she didn’t want for you, even while opting against voluntary higher taxes herself.
DOGE has already started the process of terminating Direct File, and now is the time to finish the job.
For most, the tax deadline is a depressing time of year. Sending Direct File to the wood chipper would be welcome news.
• Colin Reed is a Republican strategist, former campaign manager for Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts and co-founder of South and Hill Strategies.
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