The Dictatorship

The GOP wants even more friction between you and the IRS

Published

2 years ago

December 16, 2024

The GOP wants even more friction between you and the IRS

In the fall of 2023, the Internal Revenue Service announced a pilot program that would allow some Americans to file their taxes directly to the agency — for free. The Direct File service managed to go against at least a half-dozen federal government stereotypes: it was new and novel in a system that loathes change; it allowed people to be more efficient with their time; and the people who used it this past tax season had plenty of good things to say about their experience. In May, the IRS said the program would be expanded and made permanent.

But of course, there are Republicans who would like nothing more than to strangle a popular government initiative in its cradle. In a letter to President-elect Donald Trumpmore than two dozen House GOP members called on him to end the program through executive order once he takes office. If he heeds their request, they’ll have succeeded in ending a successful program before Americans get used to the idea that tax season need not be such a headache.

But of course, there are Republicans who would like nothing more than to strangle a popular government initiative in its cradle.

The letter effort was spearheaded by Reps. Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina. “Under the guise of offering a convenient “free-to-file” alternative preparation service, the IRS asserts itself as the tax assessor, collector, preparer, and enforcer — all in one — when the program is used,” they fret before hinting that the IRS might actively cheat taxpayers out of their money:

“This is deeply concerning and a clear conflict of interest. The IRS has little incentive to ensure hardworking Americans do not pay more than they owe in taxes and may instead benefit from families and small businesses paying greater amounts than they are required by law. Furthermore, it is highly inappropriate for the IRS to serve as a tax preparer for taxpayers while also being the final enforcer of tax violations.”

This isn’t the first time that these two lawmakers have taken direct fire at Direct File. They introduced a similar bill earlier this year and have joined their colleagues in denouncing the Biden administration’s investment in the IRS despite it being a net savings for taxpayers. It’s also worth noting that the letter writers cc’ed billionaire budget bros Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, in hopes of putting Direct File in the crosshairs of their cockamamie cost-cutting commission.

It should be said that the program that these Republicans are railing against provides just the bare minimum of service from the IRS. Direct File can only handle filings from people with the most straightforward returns, like taxpayers who only have a single source of income from a W-2 and take the standard deduction. The system can’t process filings from gig economy workers, who companies consider to be self-employed contractors, let alone those in the kind of complex financial situation that would require multiple accountants.

Moreover, even the Direct File system is still wildly inefficient compared to European countries that do much more of the work for their taxpayers than the IRS does for Americans. Though the IRS already has data to show how much you should owe each year, the agency leaves it to you to figure it out if the math lines up. The consequences for getting it wrong are dire, which makes for exactly the kind of system a reasonable person would expect Musk and Ramaswamy’s pro-government efficiency to want to improve.

The more friction in the system, the more visible of a target the IRS becomes for average Americans

But despite all that, the Direct File system is a step in the right direction given the amount of dread people feel over filing their taxes each year. A 2013 Pew Research study found that over half of Americans dislike — or downright hate — doing their taxes each year. Small wonder when the IRS’ own data shows that the average American spends roughly 13 hours preparing their 1040 form each year. Add in the money that many people pay to file both their federal and state taxes together online and you can see how anything that will streamline the process reduce that burden is a major boon for taxpayers.

It feels likely then that Smith and Edwards are trying to ingratiate themselves with wealthier Americans who would stand to benefit more from a less popular IRS. The more friction in the system, the more visible of a target the IRS becomes for average Americans; the more people who are frustrated with the IRS, the better their case for cutting even more taxes for the wealthy. It also doesn’t hurt to be in the good graces of massive tax preparation companies like Intuit, which have spent years and millions of dollars to ensure that filing taxes is as painful a process as possible. Among the reforms they blocked was a plan to go further than Direct File, letting many taxpayers file pre-populated forms for free.

The net effect is that there’s no upside to murdering Direct File ahead of tax season beyond making the federal government less responsive and useful in the eyes of Americans. Republicans can falsely claim that they’re trying to save taxpayers’ money from the clutches of the IRS. It’s clear what they’re really trying to claw back is a massive refund of Americans’ time and energy in the name of making everything a little bit worse.

Hayes Brown

Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for BLN Daily, where he helps frame the news of the day for readers. He was previously at BuzzFeed News and holds a degree in international relations from Michigan State University.

The Dictatorship

Trump’s border czar Tom Homan says vetting of ICE officer is under internal review after Maine shooting

Published

5 hours ago

July 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Trump’s border czar Tom Homan says vetting of ICE officer is under internal review after Maine shooting

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s border czar said Sunday that the vetting of an immigration officer involved in the deadly shooting of a Colombian native in Maine is under internal review after relatives revealed to The Associated Press that he had a history of serious mental health struggles and violent behavior.

Tom Homan said if the allegations against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer are true, “I don’t think he should ever have cleared vetting.”

“There’s several things under review,” Homan said on BLN about the officer, Army veteran David Brouillette. “The training is under review. I know this specific case, as far as the vetting, is under review by the internal affairs section.”

Questions about the Department of Homeland Security’s rush to hire, train and deploy thousands of new ICE officers to carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown have come into stark focus after back-to-back fatal shootings of immigrants in Maine and Houston.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin ordered a pause in vehicle stops after the fatal Maine shooting, but Trump almost immediately reversed course and insisted the stops resume as a necessary tool in his campaign to round up and deport immigrants who are in the U.S. without current legal status.

Homeland Security did not immediately respond Sunday to a request for comment about the internal review.

ICE issues new requirement for body-worn cameras during vehicle stops

Homan said that “changes have been made” and that acting ICE director David Venturella has issued a new directive that body-worn cameras must be in use if officers make a vehicle stop.

“Right now, on all vehicle stops, there’s at least one body camera on site to record the entire event,” he said.

He said Venturella “sent an instruction out that he wants at least one body camera on those vehicle stops, so we have everything on video.”

It’s unclear if the steps that the department is taking will be enough to quell the concerns coming from certain lawmakers in Congress over Homeland Security’s training and tactics as tries to reach Trump’s mass deportation goals.

Lawmakers push for answers but have more questions

Lawmakers from both parties have raised concerns.

Democrats pressed ICE officials during a closed-door briefing for the House Homeland Security Committee last week, leaving some with more questions than answers.

Lawmakers were told during the briefing that there have been 56 complaints of excessive force against ICE officers — 32 were cleared, and one was referred for disciplinary action.

No discipline had yet been handed out, the lawmakers said they were told. The rest of the incidents are still under investigation.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, has pushed for the use of body-worn cameras and ensured funding for the effort. She had said it was “extremely unfortunate” that the officer involved in the shooting in her home state was not using a camera.

Homeland Security is under scrutiny but also faces pressure to increase deportations

The Trump administration has failed to meet its goal of deporting 1 million people a year, despite an intense immigration enforcement crackdown that has resulted in violent scenes in cities nationwide.

At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration officers since the start of Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

While the Trump administration insists it is targeting the “worst of the worst” criminals, that has not always been the result and American citizens also have been among the deaths.

The ICE officer shot 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national who was killed in his car near his home in the coastal city of Biddeford.

In Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed July 7 when ICE officers chased his white work van through the streets, then shot him through the window in front of his work crew, including his brother.

Earlier this year, two Americans protesting ICE actions in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nursewere killed, sparking a backlash nationwide.

Democrats launched the longest agency shutdown in history earlier this year when they refused to fund Homeland Security in a largely failed attempt to force the administration to impose various restraints on the officers.

The Dictatorship

A forced-labor crackdown or an end-run around Congress? Dissecting Trump’s new tariffs

Published

11 hours ago

July 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A forced-labor crackdown or an end-run around Congress? Dissecting Trump’s new tariffs

NEW YORK (AP) — The Trump administration has imposed double-digit tariffs on more than 60 countriesusing a legal justification that permits the president to levy import taxes and other sanctions against countries found to engage in “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable” or “discriminatory” trade practices.

The new tariffs announced in recent days take effect just as temporary 10% worldwide tariffs expiredand critics say they are less about cracking down on forced labor than they are a way to replace those tariffs. The expired tariffs were themselves a temporary replacement for worldwide tariffs the Supreme Court struck down in February.

The tariffs were levied on countries that the U.S. says either don’t have or don’t effectively enforce a forced-labor import ban. The affected countrieswhich account for 99% of U.S. imports, were quick to protest, calling the Trump administration’s claims unfounded and arbitrary, as nations with vastly different records on forced labor received the same tariff level. The U.S. spent four months investigating but gave few details on how it arrived at the tariff rates, which are either 10% or 12.5%.

Sidestepping Congress

The tariffs were levied under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 on countries that the U.S. determined had failed “to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”

During President Donald Trump ‘s first term, he cited Section 301 to impose sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports amid a dispute over the sharp-elbowed tactics Beijing was using to challenge America’s technological dominance. The U.S. is also using 301 powers to counter what it calls unfair Chinese practices in the shipbuilding industry.

“The 301s allow a permanent tariff without going to Congress to settle the dispute,” said Barry Appleton, a law professor and co-director of New York Law School’s Center for International Law. “That’s what all of this is about. The president doesn’t want to knock on the front door of Congress, so he’s trying every side door and every unlatched window to get in.”

Little evidence that countries failed to enforce import bans

The office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) said it consulted with all 60 economies under investigation and held two rounds of public hearings, elicited more than 2,100 public comments, and had “engagement” with its trading partners about what they were doing to combat forced labor bans.

It didn’t detail its talks with the countries, saying those were confidential. Experts say it is fairly straightforward to investigate whether a country has a ban or not, but it is difficult to determine the government’s exact rationale for each country’s failure to enforce import bans.

“There’s not a lot of hard evidence there,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president for general economics and trade policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “It’s pretty laughable on its face to think that a country like the ones in Europe or in Norway or Switzerland aren’t doing enough to police forced labor.”

And even if countries do enact and enforce the forced-labor import bans the U.S. wants, they would still need to prove that they’re enforcing them to Washington’s satisfaction before the tariffs would be removed, said lawyer Patrick Childress, a partner at Holland & Knight and a former U.S. trade official.

“This suggests that no short-term path for countrywide relief from the new Section 301 tariffs will be available,” he said.

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Countries and industries reject the forced labor argument

Many countries have pushed back against the Trump administration’s findings.

Brazil, which faces a 12.5% forced-labor tariff, called the U.S. move “arbitrary and unjustified.” The U.S. “chose to manipulate an issue of great importance to human rights and the struggles of workers worldwide in order to accuse 59 countries and the European Union of unfair practices,” it said in a statement.

Australia also questioned the justification for its 12.5% tariff.

“We believe that amongst all of the countries in the world, Australia does take the issue of slavery, modern slavery, seriously, and will continue to do that,” Trade Minister Don Farrell told reporters in Adelaide.

Carve-outs have riled some industries. The National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO), which describes itself as the voice of the American textile industry, protested a mechanism that exempts the Section 301 tariffs for textile and apparel imports from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia based on those countries’ imports of U.S. cotton and textiles.

“No other industry has been more disadvantaged by forced labor than the U.S. textile industry, which employs 453,000 workers and has lost 41 plants over the past two plus years,” NCTO chief executive Kim Glas said in a statement. “We remain strongly concerned that USTR’s textile mechanism will harm the very domestic manufacturers the administration seeks to help.”

US forced-labor bans don’t always work

The U.S. has two major pieces of legislation related to forced-labor import bans. The Tariff Act of 1930 gave Customs and Border Protection the authority to seize shipments where forced labor was suspected and to block further imports. But it had a big carve-out: If there was “consumptive demand,” meaning there wasn’t sufficient supply to meet domestic demand, imports were allowed regardless of how they were produced. The Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act that took effect in 2016 eliminated that loophole.

In 2021, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was passed. It blocks imports from China’s Xinjiang region unless businesses can prove the items were made without forced labor.

But goods made with forced labor can still make it into the U.S. In 2015, an Associated Press investigation found that slave labor was used in the fishing industry in Southeast Asia. The seafood they caught made its way to supermarkets and pet food providers across the U.S.

An investigation by The Associated Press in 2020 into the $65 billion palm oil industry found labor abuses among an invisible workforce consisting of millions of men, women and children in Asia. The fruit they harvested made its way into the supply chains of major companies, including Unilever, L’Oreal, Nestle and Procter & Gamble.

Calls for a more comprehensive approach to combat forced labor

During hearings on the tariffs this month, National Retail Federation vice president Jonathan Gold, who was representing the business coalition the Joint Association Forced Labor Working Group at the hearing, said that in order for the import bans to work, they would have to be much more extensive.

He said there need to be “clear, measurable benchmarks” tied to tariffs for countries to hit, and that the U.S. should help countries build enforcement programs.

Kenya Davis, a partner at the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm, said an effective ban needs a “comprehensive approach” that provides transparency about what the investigations consisted of, along with programs that provide countries aid in enforcing bans.

The Dictatorship

Trump tried to make an example of Rosie O’Donnell. It backfired.

Published

15 hours ago

July 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Christmas. 27, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT

ByI dig Shroff

During the make-up White House Correspondents’ Dinner last Friday, the President of the United States tried to take a swipe at an old foe. “Even Rosie O’Donnell reached out from Ireland,” he told the room. “She was desperate to come back to the United States and pay her respects to Donald J. Trump. But that didn’t work out, unfortunately, because nobody wanted her to come back.”

The joke wasn’t merely unfunny, it was also inaccurate. O’Donnell already came back to the country. Two nights before Trump’s speech, she opened her new comedy showwhich centers on her life and feud with Trump, at Manhattan’s Daryl Roth Theatre. On Thursday, she appeared on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”And next month, she will guest host“Jimmy Kimmel Live!”

Two decades and two presidential inaugurations later, Trump still hasn’t let it go – and O’Donnell hasn’t backed down.

After the 2024 presidential election, O’Donnell actually did what many Americans threatened to do – leave the country. But now she is back, and that matters – because the story was never just about O’Donnell herself. It was also about the rest of us, the people watching Trump attack her.

While co-hosting a 2006 episode of “The View,” then one of the biggest daytime platforms in America, O’Donnell said that Trump was not self-madeand was in no position to lecture anyone about morality. At the time, the landlord-turned-game show host was furiousbut the feud was tabloid fodder rather than national news.

Two decades and two presidential inaugurations later, Trump still hasn’t let it go – and O’Donnell hasn’t backed down. There were years of insults, including the 2015 primary debate where moderator Megyn Kelly asked Trump about women he’d called pigs and slobs and he cut her off with three words: “only Rosie O’Donnell.” He brought her up again in his first debate with Hillary Clinton. And on Friday, in a ballroom filled with media elite who have yet to call him out as bluntly and forcefully as O’Donnell has, Trump called her a “a sick young woman. Sick older woman, I guess now I have to say.”

The two-time president of the United States, in other words, has spent twenty years returning to the same woman. She was among the first with a national platform to publicly refuse the premise his whole life is built on, and he has never been able to get over it.

Which is what makes his threat last summer worth remembering: “Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.” It wasn’t a serious legal proposal – the president cannot revoke a native-born American’s citizenship – as much as it was a MAGA theory of belonging. In threatening O’Donnell, Trump threatened to make citizenship a privilege he extends and can revoke (based on mere speech, no less). It was a warning to any critic whose passport is the only thing standing between them and a very different life and who doesn’t have O’Donnell’s resources or profile.

In the context of a twenty-year battle with the now-most-powerful man in the world, a regrouping abroad is not surrender.

Of course, there is an obvious objection to holding Rosie up as any kind of resistance example: she left. Staying carries real moral weight. Many people who have absorbed this past decade of Trump’s politics did not have an Irish grandmotheror the means to build a life somewhere else. There is something a little uncomfortable about resistance broadcast from another country, particularly when only some can afford it. But in the context of a twenty-year battle with the now-most-powerful man in the world, a regrouping abroad is not surrender.

And the impetus for her decision is crucial: “I knew, after reading Project 2025, that if Trump got in, it was time for me and my non-binary child to leave the country,” she told CNN last year. After years of being Trump’s favorite target, O’Donnell had better reason than almost anyone alive to know his obsession with settling scores and having things his way. Indeed, she knew better than much of institutional Washington, which was still reassuring itself about guardrails, norms, and adults in the room. Many institutions folded alarmingly quickly this time around: the museums, the law firms, the universities. O’Donnell did not wait for them to capitulate.

Yet she did not disappear. Now she is telling her story on her own terms, projecting Trump’s own words onto a theater wall for audiences that laugh at them instead of with them. While on Friday, the president described a broken woman pleading across the Atlantic, the actual Rosie was onstage a short train ride away, turning his words into part of her act. Twenty years after he decided she would be the punchline, she is still standing.

That is why Trump keeps coming back to O’Donnell. His campaign against her only worked if it ended with her gone or begging him for forgiveness. Personal intimidation is never only about the person being targeted. It is a warning to others: cross me and you will regret it. Too many institutions accepted that bargain. Rosie O’Donnell never did. In trying to make an example of her, Trump only made a point – and not the one he intended.

I dig Shroff

Kaivan Shroff is a senior advisor to the Institute for Education and a political commentator. He previously served on the advisory board for Dream for America, a progressive Gen Z-led non-profit. He is an alumnus of the Hillary for America digital team, holds a joint degree from Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a BA in Political Science from Brown University.