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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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What is failing, what we would change, and the conclusion we are willing to defend.
The 2024 platform's "Tech-Driven Taxes" plank was a title with no argument behind it. Filled in now, the starting fact is uncomfortable: federal tax administration still routes a filer's most sensitive financial data through private, advertising-funded companies, the tax code taxes a paycheck far more heavily than the equipment that replaces it, and Washington is fighting other countries' digital taxes one tariff threat at a time instead of replacing them with a single agreed rule.
Start with filing. In 2023, a congressional investigation led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Ron Wyden found that H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer had used Meta's tracking code to send tens of millions of filers' income levels, refund amounts, and dependent information into Facebook's ad-targeting system, sharing the investigators called likely illegal. These are the same companies whose industry spent two decades lobbying to keep a free alternative from reaching taxpayers: Intuit sued and lobbied to kill California's pre-filled ReadyReturn pilot, and in January 2024 the FTC ordered it to stop advertising TurboTax as free when most filers couldn't file for free, though the Fifth Circuit vacated that order in March 2026 on constitutional grounds, sending any further claim to a federal court, removing the FTC's own in-house process from the case. The IRS's Direct File pilot, built with no advertising business model behind it, earned a 90% positive rating from the taxpayers GAO surveyed, before the Treasury Department shut it down in November 2025, citing cost. The point isn't that a government website is better engineered than commercial software. It's that only a channel with no ad revenue to protect can structurally promise not to sell what it sees, and that promise is what commercial tax software, subsidized or not, has already broken at scale.
Restore a free, direct-to-IRS filing option for simple returns, run and audited as a data-minimization system: no third-party ad trackers, no data sale, no exceptions.
Apply that same no-third-party-tracker standard to every IRS Authorized e-file Provider, the certification nearly all commercial tax software already holds to transmit returns electronically. This broader scope reaches the paid products most filers actually use beyond the smaller Free File program and does not depend on how many filers switch away from products they already use.
Require Treasury and the Joint Committee on Taxation to publish the effective tax-rate gap between hiring a worker and expensing the equipment that replaces the task, alongside every future bill that expands depreciation or equipment write-offs.
Phase in tax-rate neutrality over ten years: reduce the employer-side payroll tax rate each year, funded by narrowing 2025's permanent 100% bonus depreciation and expanded Section 179 cap by an equivalent amount, sized to JCT's own published gap estimate under Proposal 3. The relative subsidy then narrows without requiring Congress to repeal the 2025 law outright in one vote it will not take.
Leave a flat tax on robots or automation off the table. Proposal 4's phase-in addresses the roughly 23-point gap between how lightly the tax code treats automation-capable equipment and how heavily it treats a paycheck for the same task.
Re-enter multilateral negotiations to replace country-by-country digital services taxes with one formula. The current bilateral tariff threats fall on unrelated exporters while leaving the digital firms at the center of the dispute untouched.
Every proposal here targets one specific place where the tax code or tax administration already picked a side without saying so: advertising-funded filing software, a depreciation schedule that undertaxes machines relative to paychecks, and a tariff-only response to a foreign tax dispute that a shared formula could resolve instead.
Turn frustration into useful pressure.
If this position misses evidence or a lived consequence, challenge it. If it holds up, help test it locally and connect it to the issues around it.