Elon Musk’s DOGE is considering developing a mobile app for tax filing, the Washington Post reported.
The news sent shares in the tax service providers Intuit and H&R Block tumbling.
Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been tasked with slashing government spending under Donald Trump.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency reportedly has its first target — the US tax system.
Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s cost-cutting agency has discussed developing a mobile app that would let Americans file their taxes for free, two people told The Washington Post.
The news sent the stock prices of H&R Block and Intuit, which sell tax-filing services such as TurboTax, tumbling on Tuesday. Shares were down 8% and 5%, respectively.
The launch of an app would see Musk and Ramaswamy, who’ve been die-hard supporters of Donald Trump’s successful election campaign, follow in the footsteps of Joe Biden.
The outgoing president’s Inflation Reduction Act introduced Direct File, a free IRS tax-filing system that rolled out in February.
The legislation, which attempted to break the stranglehold that private companies had on tax filing, was strongly opposed by Republicans at the time but has been used by more than 100,000 taxpayers this year, according to the Treasury.
When Trump announced that Musk and Ramaswamy would lead the new advisory commission, he said they’d be tasked with cutting regulation and government spending “from outside of Government,” with a deadline of July 2026.
Musk and Ramaswamy have suggested they could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget and “delete” entire government departments, though political experts previously told Business Insider these goals were unrealistic.
Since its announcement last week, DOGE has been active on Musk’s social-media platform, X, with an account for the organization posting that it was seeking to hire “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries.” Musk also proposed an online leaderboard for “the most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars.”
Musk and DOGE didn’t respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside normal working hours.
