Direct File shows how civic tech can work for good

Good evening from Washington, where the news cycles are moving faster than rats on a hot tin roof.

Thanks to all of the news subscribers over the weekend and everyone whose become a member since soft launch last year.

My last dispatch broke through more than most, including the recommendations for surviving the flood of feces picked up over at Digby’s Blog. Today will not be a twelve-minute read, but there are several issues to recognize.

First, the good news: the free Direct File service the U.S. Digital Service built last year for the Internal Revenue Service opened up to millions of American taxpayers in 25 states today, up from 12 last year.

This didn’t happen by accident: it took decades to overcome Intuit lobbying against the United States government building simple, easy-to-use online software for the American public to file our taxes, and we still don’t have the return-free, prepopulated forms other nations do.

I’d been banging on this drum for a long time, hoping that Congress and the White House would deliver on a common sense reform and build a secure, modern digital service.

And then, it happened. In 2023, the IRS began testing a prototype of a free online filing system with a tiny bit of funding and launched in January 2024.

Then in May 2024, in a huge win for digital government in the United States, the Treasury Department announced Direct File would be a permanent, free tax filing option. A government survey of 11,000+ filers had found that 90% ranked the user experience was “Excellent” or “Above Average,” after a pilot with ~140,000 Americans, saving an estimated $5.6 million.

Over the last year, the IRS has kept building, coming tantalizingly close to the vision of prepopulating a tax return with the data the Treasury already holds about us, including name, address, Social Security number… and a W-2, according to the New York Times.

What’s less clear is whether Direct File will survive this administration: newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Congress that it would operate this tax season during his confirmation hearing, but only said he’d “study” it for the future, signaling doubt.

It will be an early test for whether a historic success in digital delivery can survive the ire of corporations who want it to go away in the Trump age.

The Great Forgetting Begins

This takedown of fbi.gov/capitolviolence is the first significant removal of a formerly public database from the Internet I’ve seen documented from the second Trump administration. The Internet Archive has a snapshot of the website as of January 18, 2025.

ReproductiveRights.gov was the first website. (TheSkimm has now stood up ReproductiveRightsGov.com with the same content.)

And for the past week, Americans could watch the new administration scrub diversity, equity, and inclusion webpages on GitHub, in a perverse twist on government transparency.

There will be more.

Until Inauguration Day, the Justice Department has maintained as public record of the indictments and convictions for assault on police officers and seditious conspiracy that contradicted President Trump’s lies and propaganda about what his partisans did on January 6th and the weeks leading up to it.

Therefore, it had to be scrubbed.

Now, watch for a wholesale attack on independent sources of truth about seditious conspiracy. I suspect the report of the January 6th Committee will be next to fall to authoritarian blindness.

Never Forget

Today was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, on the anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz.

I visited the Holocaust Museum on this in 2022, and left forever changed. Make time to learn, and never forget. Genocide doesn’t happen all at once.

It begins with hatred and dehumanization, priming publics for repression of rights and then state violence.

The worst ideas of the 20th century have not been consigned to the dustbin of history in 2025.

“Never forget” means not memoryholing US inaction.

Never again means being honest about our history, and decrying white nationalists today as the modern scion of ancient hatred.

The Holocaust in Europe and slavery and Jim Crow laws in the United States were outgrowths of the same poisonous ideology of white supremacy.

Nazis, slavers, and segregationists have all used the same deadly fiction of race to justify genocide, deny human rights, and violate civil liberties.

As the Trump Justice Department freezes activity at the Civil Rights division, do not forget where our country has been, nor what has happened elsewhere.