[thrance]

The 18F team was doing remarkable work devoid of all profit motives, before it was gutted by this admin. Americans are missing out on a lot of QoL improvements based purely on the false belief that private is always better than public. In France, they're rolling out a new system where your taxes are filed fully automatically, and you get a PDF in your emails with a one page recap, telling you to only contact the admin if you feel like something is wrong with the recap.

Your take is the classic economist's "it works in practice, but does it work in theory?". Obviously tax filing works better when it's maintained by the government. You're severly underestimating the harmfulness of profiteering monopolies lobbying against any improvements and buying out the competition. Also, look at DOGE, with all the ruckus they made they just couldn't find that many inefficiencies. And for such "simple" software projects as a tax-filing platform, I just don't buy that private is better than public.