Direct File Is the Floor, Not the Ceiling
And the Direct File product model approach shouldn’t just be for product teams, but all teams
Once a year Code for America brings together 1000+ of the most curious, forward thinking public sector minds at their annual Summit. Teams from across the country, from the federal, state, and local governments come together to discuss tangible ways to have a greater impact on their communities and constituents.
I was asked to give a talk on what lessons organizations can learn from my experience working on Direct File – the IRS’s beloved, free, online tax filing service – and how governments at any level can embark on greater digital transformation. You can check it out.
As you can tell, I’m proud of what our team accomplished with Direct File – but going forward, services similar to Direct File should be the bare minimum that government agencies offer. We proved that excellent digital experiences are possible in the federal government and the Direct File playbook can be adapted for not just new services, but the approach is applicable to wider agency transformation. The key plays – prototyping from day one, relentless user focus, empowering teams and holding them accountable for mission-level outcomes – are transferable not just from a product launch, but also to support agency modernization.
What can we learn from Direct File?
From my vantage point, Direct File success story offers both inspiration and frustration. First, the inspiration:
With satisfaction rates higher than Apple or Netflix and an 86% increase in trust for the IRS (PDF), Direct File proved that government can deliver excellent digital services by following this playbook:
- Prototype, even when you don’t think you’ve got a shot
- Appoint a single service owner
- Obsessively put the product in front of users with all different abilities – every day
- Build an in-house team that is both technically savvy, and in this example, tax savvy
- Build a service team – join up product and customer support so you have a continuous, real time feedback loop
- Use product data to inform product updates and reduce errors (in this example, the number of rejected returns submitted)
- Skip flashy launches in favor of actually helping people and their experience with government services.
This wasn’t a playbook that was handed to us. The Direct File team empowered itself without waiting for permission and ultimately demonstrated when you have when you bust through siloes, anything can be possible in government.
Now, the frustration:
This success – a successful, high stakes launch of a complex tax product that people loved – highlighted a painful truth: excellent products alone don’t transform institutions.
Despite Direct File’s achievements, it remained largely isolated within the broader IRS ecosystem. It was bolted onto existing systems rather than fundamentally changing how government operates. The public interest / civic technology sector has spent a decade of launching brilliant services and building strong teams and yet, the pattern remains the same – we create adjacent solutions without addressing the underlying institutional problems. With only 22% of Americans trusting the federal government to do the right thing, this incremental approach is no longer sufficient.
The path forward requires thinking bigger and going beyond the margins. Direct File should be the floor, not the ceiling – the bare minimum standard for government services. We need leaders who understand that government is fundamentally a software organization operating within bureaucracy built before telephones existed, and who are curious to explore how to run an entire agency with the same user-centric, technology-strategic approach that made Direct File successful. Technology and excellent user outcomes must be viewed as a strategic imperative at the highest levels, not an afterthought left to a silo within a large organization.
Building the future, today
While the chaotic ransacking of federal programs and firing hundreds of thousands of employees is no longer making headlines and seemingly slowed down come to an end, the principles of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will likely persist. Budget cuts will further constrain already constrained organizations.
Now, as a traumatized federal workforce is left to pick up the pieces of a government that was already in a precarious position pre-DOGE, the question is how can the government deliver for users in the future? Not just replace the capacity we’ve lost, but build a new infrastructure for federal employees to deliver real improvements for Americans that is relevant and resilient in the modern era?
Starting immediately where feasible, and with a vision for what’s possible, we should focus on building better institutions rooted in service to contemporary constituents. To do this we must start thinking of our institutions as places where, to use a software term, there is continuous improvement built in from the get-go.
Right now, I’m connecting with people who believe this is possible and necessary. We come from a diverse range of perspectives but we are all excited about exploring new operating models, theories of change, and building effective government services. We are all focused on providing tangible and ambitious new structures and services that can be implemented given current constraints, and hopefully built upon in the future.
Direct File showed that government can deliver in a new way that increases trust and raises expectations. Giving up on this momentum and progress is not an option – people rely on their government and will continue to do so in spite of whatever disdain elected officials may have for those who design and deliver those services.
As I said in my Code for America talk “The first rule of government transformation is: there are a lot of rules. And there should be-ish. But we don’t need to wait for permission to rewrite them. Let’s go fix and build some things and show how it’s done.”
We cannot afford to lose the progress we’ve gained, the lessons that have been learned over decades – and we can’t wait to take action. Connect with us to share your ideas where we can use technology and modern product led approaches to improve not just government service delivery, but also how we can reimagine how government works, now.
“The first rule of government transformation is: there are a lot of rules. And there should be-ish. But we don’t need to wait for permission to rewrite them. Let’s go fix and build some things and show how it’s done.”
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
As the former U.S. Chief Data Scientist, I know first-hand how valuable and vulnerable our nation’s federal data assets are. Like many things in life, we’ve been taking our data for granted and will miss it terribly when it’s gone.
Direct File redefined what IRS service could look like, with real-time help and data-driven improvements. Let’s apply that bar elsewhere.