HIV, transgender care, climate change and other federal websites go dark
President Trump's first days in office.
He’s identified real problems with our system and possesses the political will to pursue real change. Paired with a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, he could genuinely achieve what his predecessors could not and pass major immigration reform during his term. But the sweep of these actions — mobilizing the military, pausing asylum, halting the parole process, trying to end birthright citizenship — will incur far more costs than benefits. The innocent people who are trying to flee danger or persecution in their countries and immigrate to the United States legally out of a sincere motivation to better their lives, who often help our country grow and stimulate our economy, will be caught in the machinery of these changes. All told, these executive actions are a step in the wrong direction.
Our system tends to exacerbate criminal behavior more than rehabilitate it, and the United States uses imprisonment as a punishment far more often than is productive or necessary. When it comes to the January 6 defendants, I fully support consequences for those who broke the law, but I also believe the Justice Department acted improperly in how it handled many cases.
The biggest example of this prosecutorial overreach came in a recent Supreme Court ruling that found the DOJ wrongly charged hundreds of rioters under an obstruction of justice statute that elevated the severity of their cases. This case did not fall along ideological lines; Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the majority in the 6-3 decision, while Amy Coney Barrett dissented. At the time the ruling came down, roughly 50 defendants had been convicted and sentenced on that obstruction charge alone, and 27 of them were incarcerated.
The president pardoned the vast majority of the convicted rioters of all wrongdoing in a sweeping manner, with an apparent lack of knowledge of or care for the crimes he was excusing and without expressing any remorse for the pivotal role he played on that day.
Trump withdraws from the Paris Agreement and WHO.
While Trump can justify his decisions based on some of the recent failures of the WHO and the Paris Agreement, the withdrawals still carry significant risks for public health and climate change mitigation, which the Trump administration has not shown a plan to address.
Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement won’t affect our climate change outlook much, but it is a missed opportunity to redirect U.S. climate policy toward a more realistic objective. The treaty’s goal of keeping global surface temperatures to roughly 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels is now practically unattainable after record-hot years in 2023 and 2024, and its secondary 2°C goal also appears to be in peril — a 2024 UN Environment Programme report stated that “emissions must fall 28 per cent by 2030 and 37 per cent from 2019 levels by 2035” to maintain the 2°C goal. Achieving those reductions would undoubtedly require massive, destabilizing changes to economic systems, which are neither desirable nor plausible.
However, that provides more justification for the United States to stay in, not to drop out of, the agreement. In his executive order announcing the withdrawal from the Paris accords, Trump even said the U.S. must play “a leadership role in global efforts to protect the environment” — but how can we lead from the sidelines? Withdrawing is a huge missed opportunity to direct international climate policy towards its biggest problems: China’s rise and finding alternative fuel sources.
Domestically, Trump is also missing a large opportunity to combine a center-right "all of the above" energy policy with a center-left "abundance agenda," one that maintains a seat at the table for petroleum and natural gas while we continue to invest in renewable technologies. Nuclear energy should also be part of this effort, and its adoption is squarely in line with both the Trump administration and Paris Agreement’s goals.
The WHO does critical work tracking new disease outbreaks and identifying emerging pathogens, and the U.S. withdrawal threatens its ability to aid this work and maintain the benefits we all receive from it.
Furthermore, our status as a global health leader within WHO is smart diplomacy and advances our national security interests. We can guide ongoing efforts to eradicate polio, protect children from diseases, and mitigate future outbreaks. We also receive benefits, like communications on transnational spread of dangerous viruses, scientific collaboration for each year’s seasonal flu vaccine, and access to information about emerging threats. Lastly, we can investigate global threats, as we did when U.S. scientists joined the WHO delegation that visited China in February 2020 to assess its Covid response.
Both Trump and public health experts have rightly criticized the effusive praise the WHO heaped on China in the early days of the pandemic, even as questions swirled about how the virus spread. In a critical moment for its mission, the WHO seemed more occupied with keeping China happy than fulfilling its obligations to the rest of the world. The organization also failed to acknowledge that Covid was airborne early on, providing more evidence that it was ill-prepared to meet the moment.
Trump is right that the U.S. contributes a disproportionate amount to the WHO compared to China (even though he has exaggerated the magnitude of that difference), and we should push for fairer standards. While it is now starting to diversify its revenue sources, the organization’s reliance on the U.S. is evident in the measures it has already taken since Trump announced the withdrawal order — freezing recruitment and drastically scaling back its travel budget.
With all these issues in mind, leaving the WHO is still not the answer; in fact, leaving will make our problems worse. In our absence, China would likely seek to step up to mold decisions to its will — how does that help the U.S.? If Trump wants to play tough with the WHO, why not stay involved but slash our funding commitments?
Trump’s new economic war
Saudi Arabia and other producers must cut oil prices, global central banks “immediately” needed to slash interest rates, and foreign companies must ramp up investments in US factories or face tariffs. The EU — which came in for particular opprobrium — must stop hitting big American technology companies with competition fines.
Trump’s demands came amid a frenetic first week in office in which the president launched a blitzkrieg of executive orders and announcements intended not just to reshape the state but also assert America’s economic and commercial supremacy. Tariffs of up to 25 per cent could be slapped on Canada and Mexico as early as February 1, riding roughshod over the trade deal Trump himself negotiated in his first term.
China could face levies of up to 100 per cent if Beijing failed to agree on a deal to sell at least 50 per cent of the TikTok app to a US company, while the EU was told to purchase more American oil if it wanted to avoid tariffs. Underscoring the new American unilateralism, Trump pulled the US out of the World Health Organization, as well as exiting the Paris climate accord for a second time.
This proposal throws a “hand grenade” at international tax policymaking, says Niels Johannesen, director of the Oxford university Centre for Business Taxation at Saïd Business School. The move suggests a determination to “shape other countries’ tax policy through coercion rather than through co-operation”, he adds.
“Those around Trump have had time to build up a systematic, methodological approach for protectionist trade policy and it shows,” says former UK trade department official Allie Renison, now at consultancy SEC Newgate. The approach will be to build up a case file of “evidence” against countries, she says, and then use it to extract concessions in areas of both economic and foreign policy.
The question remains how far Trump is willing to go. The danger of trampling on the rules-based order, says Jeromin Zettelmeyer, head of the Bruegel think-tank, is a complete breakdown in the diplomatic and legal channels for settling international disputes.
If Trump were to pull out of a wider range of international frameworks, such as the WTO or the IMF, he warns, then the arrangements that help govern the global economy could get “substantively destroyed”.
Some caution against being awestruck by Trump’s threats or his espousal of capitalism without limits, because his agenda was so incoherent.
“What we are seeing is huge doses of American hubris,” says Arancha González, dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po. “We are blinded by the intensity of all the issues put on the table and by Trump’s conviction. But we are not looking at the contradictions. It’s like we are all on an orange drug
Majority in U.S. Still Say Gov't Should Ensure Healthcare
Alex Griswold on X: "What are the other “Flint has clean water” and “we pretty much fixed that hole in the o-zone”s that people don’t know about? Public policy wins that happened so quietly that no one noticed." / X
MANAGING FINANCIAL INSTABILITY IN 2025
Managing Financial Instability Risks in 2025
Summary
- The analysis positions itself as a warning about economic warfare, not financial advice
Key threats identified:
- Alleged Russian influence over key US political figures including Trump and Musk
- Strategic goal to dismantle US through internal turmoil and financial destabilization
- Bitcoin characterized as an economic weapon in a zero-sum game
- Christian Nationalist alignment with plans to destroy dollar/Fed system
Immediate financial risks for 2025:
- Potential government shutdown due to no budget passage
- Proposed $2 trillion budget cuts by Musk
- US debt default risk as leverage for cuts
- Strategic Bitcoin Reserve proposal threatening dollar stability
Critical timeline identified:
- January 2 2025: Government runs out of money
- January 3: New Congress installation
- January 20: Treasury transition period
- May 2025: Potential default date ("X-Date")
Recommended defensive measures:
- Diversify holdings across bonds, real estate, gold/silver ETFs
- Avoid Bitcoin/crypto investments
- Contact representatives to oppose extreme measures
Additional considerations:
- Moving to another country unlikely to help financially
- Social Security potentially at risk
- Banking system likely to hold but spreading funds recommended
- Resolution depends on mainstream Republicans recognizing and countering these threats
Document context:
- Living document subject to updates
- Written by Dave Troy, presented as analysis of warfare operations
- Includes extensive bibliography and related articles
- Last updated November 16, 2024
The Cost-of-Living Crisis Explains Everything
headline economic figures have become less and less of a useful guide to how actual families are doing—something repeatedly noted by Democrats during the Obama recovery and the Trump years. Inequality may be declining, but it still skews GDP and income figures, with most gains going to the few, not the many. The obscene cost of health care saps family incomes and government coffers without making anyone feel healthier or wealthier.
To be clear, the headline economic numbers are strong. The gains are real. The reduction in inequality is tremendous, the pickup in wage growth astonishing, particularly if you anchor your expectations to the Barack Obama years, as many Biden staffers do.
During the Biden-Harris years, more granular data pointed to considerable strain. Real median household income fell relative to its pre-COVID peak. The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness.
the White House never passed the permanent care-economy measures it had considered.
the biggest problem, one that voters talked about at any given opportunity, was the unaffordability of American life. The giant run-up in inflation during the Biden administration made everything feel expensive, and the sudden jump in the cost of small-ticket, common purchases (such as fast food and groceries) highlighted how bad the country’s long-standing large-ticket, sticky costs (health care, child care, and housing) had gotten. The cost-of-living crisis became the defining issue of the campaign, and one where the incumbent Democrats’ messaging felt false and weak.
Rather than acknowledging the pain and the trade-offs and the complexity—and rather than running a candidate who could have criticized Biden’s economic plans—Democrats dissembled. They noted that inflation was a global phenomenon, as if that mattered to moms in Ohio and machinists in the Central Valley. They pushed the headline numbers. They insisted that working-class voters were better off, and ran on the threat Trump posed to democracy and rights. But were working-class voters really better off? Why wasn’t anyone listening when they said they weren’t?
Voters do seem to be less likely to vote in their economic self-interest these days, and more likely to vote for a culturally compelling candidate. As my colleague Rogé Karma notes, lower-income white voters are flipping from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party on the basis of identitarian issues. The sharp movement of union voters to Trump seems to confirm the trend. At the same time, high-income voters are becoming bluer in order to vote their cosmopolitan values.
The Biden-Harris administration did make a difference in concrete, specific ways: It failed to address the cost-of-living catastrophe and had little to show for its infrastructure laws, even if it found a lot to talk about. And it dismissed voters who said they hated the pain they felt every time they had to open their wallet.
Don't Panic
the idea that the next Trump term will ruthlessly implement his awful agenda. For one thing, it’s hard to say that Trump has an agenda. He’s going to rattle the saber about the border and probably find some ways to beef up enforcement, although it’s hard to say to what effect. He seems really intent on this tariffs thing, but that’s an issue that’s going to prompt huge corporate resistance which will in turn create turmoil within the Republican coalition; it seems very unlikely that he’s going to get anything like what he wants at the scale he wants.
The Trump administration was a daily exercise in corruption, controversy, and scandal. Major admin officials seemed to resign by the day. As I won’t stop pointing out, Trump’s signature policy objective (according to him!) was Obamacare repeal, and he was incapable of getting it past his own party in Congress.
Trump's MAGA allies gloat Project 2025 "is the agenda"
Why millions voted for both Trump and progressive policies
Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. Why Has No One Noticed?
Biden is the first President in decades to treat government as the designer and ongoing referee of markets, rather than as the corrector of markets’ dislocations and excesses after the fact. He doesn’t speak of free trade and globalization as economic ideals. His approach to combatting climate change involves no carbon taxes or credits—another major departure, not just from his predecessors but also from the policies of many other countries. His Administration has been far more aggressive than previous ones in taking antitrust actions against big companies.
Another way of thinking about Biden’s approach is through terminology devised by the political scientist Jacob Hacker: it rejects redistribution as a guiding liberal principle, in favor of “predistribution,” an effort to transform the economy in a way that makes redistribution less necessary.
Diaspora worried about Taiwan--are things really that bad?
Everyone Into The Grinder
How to Make a Great Government Website—Asterisk
Summary: Dave Guarino, who has worked extensively on improving government benefits programs like SNAP in California, discusses the challenges and opportunities in civic technology. He explains how a simplified online application, GetCalFresh.org, was designed to address barriers that prevent eligible people from accessing SNAP benefits, such as a complex application process, required interviews, and document submission. Guarino argues that while technology alone cannot solve institutional problems, it provides valuable tools for measuring and mitigating administrative burdens. He sees promise in using large language models to help navigate complex policy rules. Guarino also reflects on California's ambitious approach to benefits policy and the structural challenges, like Prop 13 property tax limits, that impact the state's ability to build up implementation capacity.
there are three big categories of barriers. The application barrier, the interview barrier, and the document barrier. And that’s what we spent most of our time iterating on and building a system that could slowly learn about those barriers and then intervene against them.
The application is asking, “Are you convicted of this? Are you convicted of that? Are you convicted of this other thing?” What is that saying to you, as a person, about what the system thinks of you?
Often they’ll call from a blocked number. They’ll send you a notice of when your interview is scheduled for, but this notice will sometimes arrive after the actual date of the interview. Most state agencies are really slammed right now for a bunch of reasons, including Medicaid unwinding. And many of the people assisting on Medicaid are the same workers who process SNAP applications. If you missed your phone interview, you have to call to reschedule it. But in many states, you can’t get through, or you have to call over and over and over again. For a lot of people, if they don’t catch that first interview call, they’re screwed and they’re not going to be approved.
getting to your point about how a website can fix this — the end result was lowest-burden application form that actually gets a caseworker what they need to efficiently and effectively process it. We did a lot of iteration to figure out that sweet spot.
We didn’t need to do some hard system integration that would potentially take years to develop — we were just using the system as it existed. Another big advantage was that we had to do a lot of built-in data validation because we could not submit anything that was going to fail the county application. We discovered some weird edge cases by doing this.
A lot of times when you want to build a new front end for these programs, it becomes this multiyear, massive project where you’re replacing everything all at once. But if you think about it, there’s a lot of potential in just taking the interfaces you have today, building better ones on top of them, and then using those existing ones as the point of integration.
Government tends to take a more high-modernist approach to the software it builds, which is like “we’re going to plan and know up front how everything is, and that way we’re never going to have to make changes.” In terms of accreting layers — yes, you can get to that point. But I think a lot of the arguments I hear that call for a fundamental transformation suffer from the same high-modernist thinking that is the source of much of the status quo.
If you slowly do this kind of stuff, you can build resilient and durable interventions in the system without knocking it over wholesale. For example, I mentioned procedural denials. It would be adding regulations, it would be making technology systems changes, blah, blah, blah, to have every state report why people are denied, at what rate, across every state up to the federal government. It would take years to do that, but that would be a really, really powerful change in terms of guiding feedback loops that the program has.
Guarino argues that attempts to fundamentally transform government technology often suffer from the same "high-modernist" thinking that created problematic legacy systems in the first place. He advocates for incremental improvements that provide better measurement and feedback loops.
when you start to read about civic technology, it very, very quickly becomes clear that things that look like they are tech problems are actually about institutional culture, or about policy, or about regulatory requirements.
If you have an application where you think people are struggling, you can measure how much time people take on each page. A lot of what technology provides is more rigorous measurement of the burdens themselves. A lot of these technologies have been developed in commercial software because there’s such a massive incentive to get people who start a transaction to finish it. But we can transplant a lot of those into government services and have orders of magnitude better situational awareness.
There’s this starting point thesis: Tech can solve these government problems, right? There’s healthcare.gov and the call to bring techies into government, blah, blah, blah. Then there’s the antithesis, where all these people say, well, no, it’s institutional problems. It’s legal problems. It’s political problems. I think either is sort of an extreme distortion of reality. I see a lot of more oblique levers that technology can pull in this area.
LLMs seem to be a fundamental breakthrough in manipulating words, and at the end of the day, a lot of government is words. I’ve been doing some active experimentation with this because I find it very promising. One common question people have is, “Who’s in my household for the purposes of SNAP?” That’s actually really complicated when you think about people who are living in poverty — they might be staying with a neighbor some of the time, or have roommates but don’t share food, or had to move back home because they lost their job.
I’ve been taking verbatim posts from Reddit that are related to the household question and inputting them into LLMs with some custom prompts that I’ve been iterating on, as well as with the full verbatim federal regulations about household definition. And these models do seem pretty capable at doing some base-level reasoning over complex, convoluted policy words in a way that I think could be really promising.
caseworkers are spending a lot of their time figuring out, wait, what rule in this 200-page policy manual is actually relevant in this specific circumstance? I think LLMS are going to be really impactful there.
It is certainly the case that I’ve seen some productive tensions in counties where there’s more of a mix of that and what you might consider California-style Republicans who are like, “We want to run this like a business, we want to be efficient.” That tension between efficiency and big, ambitious policies can be a healthy, productive one. I don’t know to what extent that exists at the state level, and I think there’s hints of more of an interest in focusing on state-level government working better and getting those fundamentals right, and then doing the more ambitious things on a more steady foundation.
California seemed to really try to take every ambitious option that the feds give us on a whole lot of fronts. I think the corollary of that is that we don’t necessarily get the fundamental operational execution of these programs to a strong place, and we then go and start adding tons and tons of additional complexity on top of them.
Committee Chairs Rodgers, Cantwell Unveil Historic Draft Comprehensive Data Privacy Legislation
Immigration Reduces Crime - An emerging scholarly consensus
Do immigrant workers depress the wages of native workers
Opinion | Bernie Sanders: Justice for the Palestinians and Security for Israel
we must demand an immediate end to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, which is causing an enormous number of civilian casualties and is in violation of international law. Israel is at war with Hamas, not innocent Palestinian men, women and children. Israel cannot bomb an entire neighborhood to take out one Hamas target. We don’t know if this campaign has been effective in degrading Hamas’s military capabilities. But we do know that a reported 70 percent of the casualties are women and children, and that 104 U.N. aid workers and 53 journalists have been killed. That’s not acceptable.
Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party was explicitly formed on the premise that “between the Sea and the Jordan [River] there will only be Israeli sovereignty,” and the current coalition agreement reinforces that goal. This is not just ideology. The Israeli government has systematically pursued this goal. The last year saw record Israeli settlement growth in the West Bank, where more than 700,000 Israelis now live in areas that the United Nations and the United States agree are occupied territories. They have used state violence to back up this de facto annexation. Since Oct. 7, the United Nations reports that at least 208 Palestinians, including 53 children, have been killed by Israeli security forces and settlers. This cannot be allowed to continue.
The blank check approach must end. The United States must make clear that while we are friends of Israel, there are conditions to that friendship and that we cannot be complicit in actions that violate international law and our own sense of decency. That includes an end to indiscriminate bombing; a significant pause to bombing so that massive humanitarian assistance can come into the region; the right of displaced Gazans to return to their homes; no long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza; an end to settler violence in the West Bank and a freeze on settlement expansion; and a commitment to broad peace talks for a two-state solution in the wake of the war.
Israel’s Insidious Narrative About Palestinian Prisoners
Consumer Bureau to Push Banks to Refund More Victims of Scams on Zell…
I Set Out to Create a Simple Map for How to Appeal Your Insurance Denial. Instead, I Found a Mind-Boggling Labyrinth.
I tried to create a spreadsheet that would guide readers through the appeals process for all the different types of insurance and circumstances. When a patient needs care urgently, for instance, an appeal follows a different track. But with each day of reporting, with each expert interviewed, it got more and more confusing. There was a point when I thought I was drowning in exceptions and caveats. Some nights were filled with a sense that I was trapped in an impossible labyrinth, with signs pointing to pathways that just kept getting me further lost
You may think that UnitedHealthcare is your insurer because that’s the name on your insurance card, but that card doesn’t tell you what kind of plan you have. Your real insurer may be your employer.
Government insurance is its own tangle. I am a Medicare beneficiary with a supplemental plan and a Part D plan for drug coverage. The appeals process for drug denials is different from the one for the rest of my health care. And that’s different from the process that people with Medicare Advantage plans have to follow.
The federal government sets minimum standards that each state Medicaid program has to follow, but states can make things more complicated by requiring different appeal pathways for different types of health care. So the process can be different depending on the type of care that was denied, and that can vary state to state.
I sought help from Jack Dailey, a San Diego attorney and coordinator for the California Health Consumer Alliance, which works with legal-aid programs across the state. On a Zoom call, he looked at an Excel spreadsheet I’d put together for Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, based on what I had already learned. Then he shook his head. A few days later, he came back with a new guide, having pulled an all-nighter correcting what I had put together and adding tons of caveats.
It was seven single-spaced pages long. It detailed five layers of the Medi-Cal appeals process, with some cases winding up in state Superior Court. There were so many abbreviations and acronyms that I needed to create a glossary. (Who knew that DMC-ODS stands for Drug Medi-Cal Organized Delivery System?) And this was for just one state!
It’s especially complicated in oncology, said Dr. Barbara McAneny, a former president of the American Medical Association who runs a 6,000-patient oncology practice in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“My practice is built on the theory that all the patients should have to do is show up and we should manage everything else … because people who are sick just cannot deal with insurance companies. This is not possible,” she said.
McAneny told me she spends $350,000 a year on a designated team of denial fighters whose sole job is to request prior authorization for cancer care — an average 67 requests per day — and then appeal the denials.
For starters, she said bluntly, “we know everything is going to get denied.” It’s almost a given, she said, that the insurer will lose the first batch of records. “We often have to send records two or three times before they finally admit they actually received them. … They play all of these kinds of delaying games.”
McAneny thinks that for insurance companies, it’s really all about the money.
Her theory is that insurance companies save money by delaying spending as long as possible, especially if the patient or the doctor gives up on the appeal, or the patient’s condition rapidly declines in the absence of treatment.
For an insurance company, she said, “you know, death is cheaper than chemotherapy.”
Opinion: Our institutions failed us before Lewiston shooting
Before we have sorted out who or what failed and why, many people have focused on restricting gun access. I will not blithely dismiss that discussion. There is simply no getting around the fact that America has a lot of guns, and it would not be intellectually honest to dispute that the mass availability of guns makes attacks like this easier to commit. Were there to be a wholesale gun confiscation in America, there would doubtless be fewer attacks like this.
The inability of society to properly monitor and manage people experiencing mental health crises is behind many problems, and is largely attributable to the well-intentioned but ultimately problematic choice to deinstitutionalize mental health care in favor of a model of community-based management.
I’m certainly not advocating for “re-institutionalization” but clearly something has to change, and the pendulum needs to swing back toward stronger interventions. Maine and the nation can design a better system that preserves humane treatment while simultaneously taking seriously the need to protect both society, and those like Card who desperately needed help and didn’t get it.
David Grann on ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Getting Swept Up in the Culture Wars: “You Can’t Obliterate History”
Big Tech Can’t Stop Telling On Itself | by Cory Doctorow | Sep, 2023 …
A brief history of the Netanyahu-Hamas alliance | Opinion
The IRS Takes a Welcome Step Into the 20th Century
the IRS has hitherto set up neither a direct-filing system nor an automatic one, because of lobbying and conservative ideology. Intuit and its ilk have pressured both Congress and the IRS to head off such systems, and then taken the resulting profits to lobby for the tax code to be made more complicated, so ordinary Americans are even more tempted to pay to avoid the headache. One particularly evil objective in this area has been to make claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit as complex as possible, to prey on poor people who tend not to have the skill or time to fill out difficult forms. Roughly between 13 and 22 percent of EITC benefits are gulped down by tax prep companies.
Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free
Pluralistic: The IRS will do your taxes for you (if that’s what you prefer) (17 May 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Inuit is a freaky company. For decades, its defining CEO Brad Smith ran the company as a cult of personality organized around his trite sayings, like "Do whatever makes your heart beat fastest," stenciled on t-shirts worn by employees. Other employees donned Brad Smith masks for selfies with their Beloved Leader.
the cartel sabotaged Free File from the start. They blocked search engines from indexing their Free File services, then bought Google ads for "free file" that directed searchers to soundalike programs ("Free Filing," etc) that hit them for hundreds of dollars in tax-prep fees. They also funneled users to versions of Free File they were ineligible for, a fact that was only revealed after the user spent hours painstaking entering their financial information, whereupon they would be told that they could either start over or pay hundreds of dollars to finish filing with a commercial product.
"e-file…is wholly redundant": Well, no, Rick, it's not redundant, because there is no existing Free File system except for the one your corrupt employer made and hid "in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"
"nothing more than a solution in search of a problem": The problem this solves is that Americans have to pay Intuit billions to pay their taxes. It's a tax on paying taxes. That is a problem.
Now I want to address the reply guys who are vibrating with excitement to tell me about their 1099 income, the cash money they get from their lemonade stand, the weird flow of krugerrands their relatives in South African FedEx to them twice a year, etc, that means that free file won't work for them because the IRS doesn't actually understand their finances.
That's a hard problem, all right. Luckily, there is a very simple answer for this: use a tax-prep service.
Actually, it's not a hard problem. Just use a tax-prep service. That's it. No one is going to force you to use the IRS's free e-file. All you need to do to avoid the socialist nightmare of (checks notes) living with less red-tape is: continue to do exactly what you're already doing.
GOP rejected White House effort to close tax loopholes in debt ceiling talks