Direct File, the Internal Revenue Service’s long-promised free tax filing software, might be at risk of being killed off by the Trump administration, but the code that made the service possible will live on even if the program itself doesn’t. According to 404 Media, the IRS published most of the code for its Direct File on GitHub, making it open source and available for others to use, much to the chagrin of tax lobbyists everywhere.
Before you mistake the move as an act of resistance by those within the agency who are trying to keep the project alive, Direct File getting open-sourced was always part of the plan. The code was published in compliance with the SHARE IT Act, which requires agencies to share custom source code (though, of course, the Trump administration is not always motivated by following the law, so this wasn’t a given).
In a report published last year, the IRS explained its reasoning for making the code available publicly: “First, it would enable public scrutiny of that code and invite independent groups to assess its accuracy and report potential issues. Second, other tax administrators, both in states and internationally, could build upon and contribute to the IRS’s work, improving the robustness of the software over time and providing additional public value.”
Now that the code is available, it should help others develop functioning (and hopefully free) tax-filing tools. According to 404 Media, the code can’t run independently because it still relies on internal IRS systems; however, it does provide a strong baseline for a platform that is essentially guaranteed to be in compliance with the federal government, as it was built by the government itself.
On a related note, 404 Media pointed out that several of the people who were heavily involved in building Direct File for the IRS have since left the government entirely and joined the Economic Security Project’s Future of Tax Filing Fellowship, where they work on projects designed to make filing taxes simpler and more accessible. It seems like just the type of people who might want to build something based on that open-source codebase.
Direct File getting open-sourced comes at a time when there is a target on the program’s back. The Trump administration, Elon Musk, and tax lobbyists have set out to kill Direct File in one way or another. Musk’s DOGE blew up 18F, the government agency that was key to building Direct File, and set out to explicitly shut down the Direct File tool despite it being wildly popular among taxpayers. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill would also cut the budget entirely for Direct File, leaving it dead in the water, which would surely thrill Intuit, the company behind TurboTax, that spent millions of dollars lobbying to kill a government-provided free tax filing option.
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