To answer your last question: I'm rooting for launching a pilot of a public system that is better than the for-profit alternatives used by the large majority of

To answer your last question: I'm rooting for launching a pilot of a public system that is better than the for-profit alternatives used by the large majority of people. What I want long term is for filing taxes to no longer be a difficult and error-prone process that everyone dreads doing each year. In order to achieve that, I believe it is necessary for it to stop being such a cash cow, with its profits used on tons of advertising to make people believe it's normal that it's so hard to do this and lobbying to maintain (or worsen) that status quo. I'd ask you to consider how the companies with the dominant products in this space afford the "file for free" products that most people use. Perhaps it is altruism? Or maybe it's the normal way that companies offer free products that collect a lot of personal information, by profiting off that data. I'm incredibly sympathetic to people here who don't want to personally use this until it is no longer using ID.me (I may well make the same choice if this were available at all in my state this year), but I'm incredibly unsympathetic to criticizing this pilot program for not waiting until this problem (which the vast majority of people don't care about) to be solved.