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Elon,
I know your relationship with ProPublica got off to a rough start when we contacted you about a story we were covering your federal taxes. You answered with a single punctuation mark — “?” — and then called the story in which you were mentioned “a bunch of false stuff.”
We can agree to disagree with this story and many others. But we thought it might be useful to reach out again in light of your role alongside Vivek Ramaswamy as co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Simply put: When you’re trying to uncover wasteful practices and waste at federal agencies, you’ll find many actionable issues that have emerged in our reports over the past 16 years. You and Vivek noted in your recent Wall Street Journal op-ed about your plans for DOGE that “the federal government’s procurement process is also severely disrupted.”
Our reports over the years provide some vivid illustrations of this point of view. ProPublica’s work in the Navy overspending and the design flaws in his ships are second to none. We recently revealed how Microsoft beat out its competitors providing cybersecurity software to the largest government agencies, including the Pentagon. (Microsoft defended its conduct, saying in a statement that its “sole purpose during this period was to support the administration’s pressing request to increase the security of federal agencies that are consistently targeted by sophisticated national state threats.”)
Perhaps the most direct relevance of our journalism to your work stems from your declared interest in creating a phone app that most Americans could use to file their taxes.
Good journalism matters:
Our nonprofit, independent newsroom has one mission: to hold powerful people accountable. This is how our investigations are progressing driving real-world change:
We are trying something new. Was it helpful?
No national news organization has been more focused on this topic than ProPublica. We have carefully documented why the United States is one of the only industrialized countries in the world that does not provide its citizens with free filing: Companies like Intuit, which make billions of dollars selling tax preparation software, have convinced Congress to block free filing and keep own business.
I would encourage you to look at history “Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free.”
You’re a busy man, so I’ll give the TL;DR version: The tax preparation industry blocked free filing by organizing a bipartisan coalition on Capitol Hill that leans on House Republicans but includes Democrats like Zoe Lofgren, who represents Silicon Valley .
The industry has also drawn support from longtime Republican figures such as Grover Norquist, who called free-filing advocates “big spendthrifts in Washington, D.C.” who are trying to “socialize all tax preparation in America.”
As you know (or will soon learn if you follow this program), despite decades of resistance, the IRS recently launched pilot program for free submission. It’s working pretty well, but it’s likely to remain a small scale unless something changes in the current Washington status quo.
This is where you and Vivek have a historic opportunity.
What has always impressed me about Washington is its ability to resist fundamental change. People come with big plans for reform and often become part of the problem.
I began my career as a reporter from Washington in 1983, two years after President Ronald Reagan took office promising to change the way business was done in the capital. Reagan was serious about concrete ideas to save money and reduce waste. He created a presidential commission of business leaders and urged its members to work like “tireless dogs.”
“Leave no stone unturned in the quest to eradicate inefficiency,” said the President.
Two years later, the commission released 47 volumes of reforms it said could save $424 billion in government spending over three years. Most of the proposals required congressional action, a difficult task when the Senate was controlled by Republicans and the House of Representatives by Democrats. As a result, only 27% of the recommendations were implemented. By the time Reagan’s term ended, government spending had risen and the deficit had ballooned.
I believe that Republican control of the presidency and both houses of Congress gives you and Vivek the best opportunity to address issues such as free tax filing that have long been considered futile. There is a broad coalition of Americans who voted for Donald Trump, many of whom feel the government cares little about their concerns. Politicians in both parties understand that their future may depend on taking real, measurable steps to address these issues.
Abolishing the annual ritual of paying money to a third party to let the government know it already knows about your personal finances could be popular and more effective.
There was a lot of skepticism about whether it was possible to achieve your goal of cutting trillions of dollars from the federal budget. It seems to me that you could only accumulate this level of savings by cutting everything from Medicare to military spending. I think the president’s political advisers will take the ax out of your hands before you hit the first trillion.
That’s not to say there aren’t a number of government programs that could be better executed. We look at our work in holding the government to account, and spending public money is one of the highlights of our reports. That’s why we’ve written about it many times waste and fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, the two largest government health care programs. (We also walked the path cutting these programs hurts people.)
I have no doubt that in the years to come we will be writing stories that will enrage people you know. Some of our work may even be focused on you or your companies. With great power comes great control. (As in years past, we will always contact you for your response before publishing anything about you.)
That said, I’d be disappointed if we didn’t publish a couple of articles that made you want to barge into Vivek’s office and say, “Damn, that’s outrageous. We could fix that.’
the best
Steve Engelberg
