I disagree wholeheartedly that there isn’t much to study. Direct File was actually a resounding success, especially when you consider how much difficulty governments tend to have shipping good software products. There is a lot of good information in here that government entities can learn from.
Including how and why it died. That is an important lesson for the entire governmental enterprise, including all decision-makers, to learn: that government CAN deliver something good and one single person should not be in totalitarian control
> That is an important lesson for the entire governmental enterprise, including all decision-makers, to learn: that government CAN deliver something good and one single person should not be in totalitarian control
This is only a major epiphany to proponents of a US-based ideological current, and mostly the result of anti-communist cold war propaganda. The rest of the world is well aware that state projects can and do succeed more than they fail.
I think it speaks to doing things "the right way". Direct file could have been mandated by Congress, but it wasn't. Instead it only directed the IRS to do a "study" as a "voluntary agency initiative". That left full control of whether it should be done in the hands of the IRS and the executive branch.
More concretely and timely for this discussion - the beneficial ownership registry was passed in the 2021 NDAA by congress and signed by Biden. So there's a law on the books that FinCEN needs to collect the ownership data for all US companies to prevent money laundering.
This week, Bessent decided that the signature policy of the Corporate Transparency Act, a bipartisan effort to stymie cartels and foreign oligarchs, would not only be stopped, but they instructed FinCEN to delete all the records they've already collected.
Easily the most lawless gang of corrupt bureaucrats that have ever held office in the US.
Not a funding issue per se, but Congress also passed a law requiring that the "Epstein files" be released by December 2025. Yet here we are, ~9 months later, and the Republican administration is still violating the law's deadline and its requirements not to black out the names of people who aren't trafficking-victims.
Meanwhile, Republican legislators are looking at the people responsible and *checks notes* ... rewarding them with powerful government jobs. [0]
It didnt happen because Intuit lobbied against it like their business model was in existential crisis. The canary is that inappropriate power imbalances will ruin even the most hard one feats of human collaboration and effort. Its like learning about why jaywalking became a crime, or why recycling is a consumer’s respobsibility. Edit: So I'm about as original as a model can be as I went to go fact check myself and I basically cliff noted an AI summary for yall pre-gen.
I doubt this is the reason. In this particular case, it's more likely that a company such as Turbotax paid a sufficient sum of money to the President or one of his family members in exchange for this consideration.
Congress authorized a study, not a full blown system, or even a working prototype. No taxpayers should have ever been allowed to use it to file a tax return.
Despite Congress appropriating only $15M to do the study, the program managed to blow through at least $41M, likely more.[1] This included advertising costs in some states to encourage taxpayers to use the system.
This would be like your boss asking you to send him an email about the pros and cons of adding a feature, and you going and implementing the feature, pushing it to production, and then asking customers for feedback on it.
Whether or not the feature was a success is 100% irrelevant. That’s not how things should be done. We are a nation of laws, and even if the program was a smashing success, there needs to be accountability.
> No taxpayers should have ever been allowed to use it to file a tax return.
I see why blowing too much money on the study is a problem. Though this needs to be compared against the norms around this kind of thing. If we wanted these limits to be strict, we would make it actually impossible to spend more.
But I do not understand why creating a system and letting people use it would be a problem.
"We believe the best way to get this information would be to build a prototype and see how popular it will be" makes perfect sense to me.
> this needs to be compared against the norms around this kind of thing
Because other government programs waste money, it must be okay that this one did too?
Congress put $15M in the Inflation Reduction Act for the purpose of a study. If they wanted to spend $41M or $400M, don't you think they would have written that number into the law instead?
> But I do not understand why creating a system and letting people use it would be a problem
I don't know how to say this in any other way: it's because it was not authorized by law. That reason alone is sufficient.
This attitude of "well it was for a good cause, I suppose we can just ignore the law in this instance" is the root of many of our problems in this country. At its root it's really just "the ends justify the means" thinking.
Today it may be something you support. But tomorrow it's deportations or illegal recess appointments or unlawful searches and seizures. When you allow certain laws to be enforced and others to be ignored you set the stage for tyranny.
In many ways we are reaping the harvest of this lax attitude toward how laws are executed in this country. I hope this program serves as an object lesson in why complying with the law may seem tedious but is actually the bedrock of our constitutional order.
> Because other government programs waste money, it must be okay that this one did too?
No, but it's unfair to single out one program when they all do that.
> This attitude of "well it was for a good cause [...]"
That is not my argument. I don't see why a study cannot include a product being built and used by the public. Unless there's a legal argument where "study" is a specific legal term, not "we'll do things to learn about this topic".
Yeah sorry but to be out here defending the actions of this administration while trotting out that phrase, you either have no self awareness or are a craven liar. Nation of laws SMH…
