07/18/2025

Activists Seek to Preserve IRS’s Direct File Now that Trump Canceled It

The program offered free tax filing for two years under Biden

The Trump administration has shut down the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) two-year-old experiment in free streamlined tax filing, but the people behind Direct File don’t want to let it go quietly.

The massive tax-and-spending law that President Donald Trump signed on July 4 included funds to study a replacement for the IRS-built website that the Republican administration had already begun to dismantle. Yet the idea of keeping the public filing option alive in some form has brought together a collection of activists and computer programmers including former IRS employees, nonprofit advocates and even an 18-year-old dishwasher in Arizona who wants to create his own tax filing website despite having never filed a return for himself.

“It’s no longer a question of ‘Can this be done, and can this be done well?’” said Gabriel Zucker, one of four people who have formed a group at the nonprofit Economic Security Project to keep preparing Direct File for future administrations to use. “It’s just a question of: Do we want to do it?”

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.