One of the most most tangible federal government innovations of recent years was Direct File, the long-sought effort to allow taxpayers a free and user-friendly means to report their taxes. The fate of Direct File had hung in the balance, but AP reports that sometime last month the Direct File team were told to expect layoffs and not to work on a version of the product for the next tax season. It appears that Direct File is dead.

Even if you never used Direct File, you should mourn its loss. It’s showed that good government tech and tech for good are compatible goals. Government can build high quality tech tools internally, better and more cheaply than if the project was farmed out to a private vendor.

But the Trump administration is not serious about using technology to make services work better. Instead they will kill low-cost and high-value tech innovations within government, deliberately making services worse and more expensive. DOGE is in the business of enabling private sector wealth extraction from the poor, and destroying public sector value creation.

The death of Direct File is also a testament to the power of rent-seeking, as the private tax preparation industry’s years of lobbying to kill a public option paid off.