Comment by Jtsummers

1) It wasn't mandatory so it's hard to take this argument seriously. If there was a concern about it being made mandatory, that could have been addressed by Congress and/or the courts (if there was a legal/Constitutional basis to make it only optional).

2) Amortized cost, it's still under development so the costs are going to be relatively high and has many restrictions which reduce who can use it to file (also publicity, it's still less well-known). Given 1-3 more years the cost per filing would likely have been much cheaper as the annual spending would have likely decreased (as the system matured) and the number of filers would have increased.

EDIT:

> Cheap open source tax assessment & preparation seems like an extremely good use case for AI Agents.

Please no. Why would you use AI agents for something that's really a complicated spreadsheet? Make the complicated spreadsheet that gives you the same results for the same inputs instead of an "AI" that might give different results on different runs.