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Modernize federal tax administration around data-minimizing filing, tax-code neutrality between labor and automation, and a multilateral resolution to the digital services tax dispute.
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AI-researched, unverifiedLast Reviewed
Jul 5, 2026
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The specific delta between this position and the current mainstream approaches of both major parties.
On filing, the divide is partisan and specific. More than 150 House and Senate Democrats, led by Sens. Warren, Coons, and Wyden and Rep. Sherman, introduced the Direct File Act of 2026 to restore and permanently codify the program the Trump administration shut down; the same 2025 tax law that ended Direct File funded a $15 million Treasury task force to pursue free filing through expanded private-sector partnerships instead. This issue sides with a government-run channel, but for a narrower reason than either party states: Democrats argue government should provide the service because it's free and simple; this issue argues a government-run channel is the only one that can structurally guarantee no third-party data sharing, a guarantee no subsidized private alternative can make credibly given the industry's record. Proposal 2, the no-tracker mandate on certified private software, is where this issue agrees with the administration's private-sector-can-do-it framing, on the condition that the private sector be held to the standard it broke.
On automation and the tax code, neither party has taken up Acemoglu, Manera, and Restrepo's finding that the tax code itself, more than AI, is driving excess automation. Sen. Sanders' robot tax is the most visible current proposal and comes from the progressive wing of the Democratic caucus rather than the party's mainstream platform; the 2025 tax law's expansion of full expensing, passed with near-unanimous Republican support, moved policy in the opposite direction, widening the exact gap the tax-code research identifies. This issue rejects Sanders' instrument while accepting his diagnosis that current tax treatment of automation needs fixing, a synthesis neither party has assembled on its own.
On digital services taxes, both the Trump and Biden administrations agreed DSTs discriminate against U.S. firms; USTR made that finding in 2019 under Trump, and neither Biden nor Trump's second term reversed it. The parties differ on method: the Biden administration stayed at the OECD table through 2024; the current administration withdrew in January 2025 and moved to bilateral tariff threats. This issue's delta is a return to the abandoned method, rather than a new position on the underlying discrimination finding.
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