Direct File should be eliminated swiftly, and Democrats should spare us the hypocritical whining about unelected auditors.
L iberal politicians and commentators feigned outrage when President Trump’s DOGE team began to audit the trillions of dollars in payments that the U.S. Treasury Department sends out annually. The review was long overdue, and it revealed that the Treasury loses an estimated $1 billion per week to fraud. It’s no wonder that 64 percent of voters believe the federal government is excessively wasteful and inefficient.
Regardless, prominent Democrats scoffed at the review, shrieked with outrage, and dubiously claimed that taxpayers’ personal information could be compromised in the process. According to Representative Jimmy Gomez from California, DOGE is pursuing an “illegal and blatant power grab” that is cause for “a five-alarm warning.”
But all those crying foul have turned a blind eye as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), housed within the Treasury Department, has been compromising taxpayers’ sensitive information for decades. For starters, the agency has routinely failed to inform taxpayers when their personal data, such as Social Security numbers, have been stolen in a data breach. The agency has also targeted political organizations, low-income taxpayers, and black taxpayers for audits and enforcement actions. Even President Trump himself was a target of IRS bureaucrats in 2019 when his personal tax information was purposely leaked.
What’s more, the same Democrats championed the IRS during the Biden administration when it unilaterally built and launched the pilot program called Direct File.
Direct File is the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren and Joe Bankman, the father of Sam Bankman-Fried. Ultimately, their goal is to have IRS bureaucrats prepare taxes for people, and then simply send them a bill. They view this as the underpinning for full government control and a universal basic income.
It’s a conflict of interest of the highest order, as noted in a report released by Citizens Against Government Waste. The agency charged with extracting every possible penny for the federal bureaucracy cannot be impartial and get you — the taxpayer — every dollar you’re owed in your refund.
Senator Warren and others have railed against allowing an “unelected billionaire” and auditors to look into the Treasury’s payment systems. But, again, spare us the outrage here: Direct File was never approved by Congress.
The problems with Direct File don’t end there. The Biden administration’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act awarded over $50 billion through 2031 to the IRS so that the agency could do things like hire 87,000 enforcement agents to go after hardworking taxpayers and their families. A fraction of that funding was earmarked to study whether a filing option like Direct File would be feasible, but the IRS built the program before it submitted the study to Congress.
The IRS’s deception didn’t stop there. The Taxpayers Protection Alliance recently published FOIA documents from the IRS showing the agency purposefully hid negative taxpayer feedback regarding Direct File. Many taxpayers expressed serious concerns about having to share their personal data with third-party websites, while others experienced frequent website crashes, lower refunds, and other technical difficulties. One user even said it was “weird, dystopian, and privacy invasive.”
Advocates for Direct File deceptively claim that the program is completely free. But “the Direct File program is not free,” as has been pointed out elsewhere. “Only in Washington is a program that costs more than $100 million considered free.”
And what did all of that spending get them? Less than 1 percent of eligible taxpayers submitted accepted returns through the program in its first year.
The Biden-Harris IRS bypassed Congress and unilaterally launched Direct File for the 2025 tax season. Elon Musk and the DOGE team were right to criticize the program. Conservative members of Congress agree, with Senator Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) and Representative Adrian Smith (R., Neb.) recently introducing legislation to repeal Direct File. It should be eliminated swiftly, and Democrats should spare us the hypocritical whining about unelected auditors.
Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a senior economic adviser to Donald Trump, and a former nominee to serve as a governor of the Federal Reserve. James Carter is a Principal with Navigators Global. He previously headed President-elect Donald Trump’s tax team during the 2016-17 transition and served as a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for President George W. Bush.