More Americans are becoming interested in tax resistance

For many Americans, tax season is met with groans and the begrudging collection of W-2s and bank statements. It’s more of a headache than an issue, per se. But for Chicago-based attorney and organizer Rachel Cohen, filing taxes was an issue — a moral one.

In March 2025, Cohen quit the white-shoe law firm where she worked a salaried position after it reached a settlement with the Trump administration to avoid a targeted executive order and agreed to provide $100 million worth of pro bono work to causes the administration supported. She then became a contract employee for most of the year — working positions that weren’t subject to federal tax withholding — and discovered she owed roughly $8,800 in federal income taxes.

Something in her didn’t sit right. Cohen has been outspoken against the Trump administration online and has been active in protests; she’s even been pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed. “So I found myself wondering, if I was willing to run these physical risks, why on earth would I give the government almost $9,000” for detention centers and ICE?

Cohen is part of a growing number of Americans who view tax resistance as a form of dissent and resistance to federal policies they oppose. She’s penned an essay for Current Affairs and posted a series of Instagram reels educating readers and followers about her decision. (She wants to be clear: She is not encouraging others to withhold their income taxes.)

And to be clear: Withholding your federal income taxes is not legal.

“It is illegal to elect — to choose — to not pay your federal taxes, whether you object, even on potentially legitimate grounds, to certain ways that the federal government is spending money,” said Joseph Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center.

The U.S. tax system is based on voluntary compliance, which has hovered at around 80-85% since around 2001. (By comparison, in many other countries, your taxes are automatically filed for you by the government.) But the word “voluntary” is doing a lot of work there. It’s voluntary in the way that it’s voluntary to follow other laws — you can choose not to comply, but it is, in fact, illegal and you risk consequences as a result.

There are fines for both failing to file your taxes and failing to pay your taxes. In rare instances, property seizure or prison time could be on the table.

The growing wave of interest in tax resistance comes as the IRS is struggling to deal with significant cuts to staffing and funding, as well as tax policy changes that came out of last summer’s tax bill. But Rosenberg cautioned that reduced resources at the IRS may not necessarily translate into reduced enforcement. After all, the IRS is technically a law enforcement agency (though we don’t often think of it that way). Gangster Al Capone was famously booked on tax evasion charges.

“The IRS, I think, is trying to use, you know, the digital records and computerization and artificial intelligence to improve the type of enforcement actions that they can do, even at reduced staff,” he said. “What the IRS may or may not be able to catch is not just a function of the dollars involved … but also IRS priorities.”

A spokesperson for the IRS declined to comment for this story but instead directed Marketplace to the IRS article titled The Truth About Frivolous Tax Arguments.

One tax strike educational organization that’s seen a surge in interest recently is the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, which was founded in 1982. Lincoln Rice is a coordinator with the group and said the uptick in interest actually predates the second Trump administration.

“The war in Gaza has been a watershed moment for our current increase in war tax resistance, with a lot of people realizing that most of the weapons being used in Gaza were being funded by U.S. tax dollars as military aid to Israel,” Rice said.

While U.S. aid to Israel for the Israel-Hamas war following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack began under Biden, federal policies under the Trump administration have sparked additional interest in tax resistance, Rice said. The laundry list of reasons is lengthy, he noted: DOGE cuts; threats against Canada and Greenland; the ousting of the Venezuelan president; a major increase in immigration raids, detentions, and deportations; the killing of two American citizens by ICE agents in Minneapolis; and now, of course, war in Iran.

According to Rice, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee website typically receives 40,000 unique visitors in a given year. In January — during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis — that number surged to 110,000.

It’s worth noting, too, that tax resistance is nothing new. The founding fathers of the United States refused to pay taxes to King George III without fair representation. Henry David Thoreau famously withheld tax payments as a protest against slavery. Musician Joan Baez refused to pay 60% of her federal income tax to protest the Vietnam War. Activist Randy Kehler spent time in jail and saw his house seized by the IRS after protesting U.S. military spending by withholding federal taxes.

Many tax resisters will argue that they’re withholding taxes because the government is acting against their morals or beliefs. (To do so is against the law.) But many people in the U.S. express frustration and disagreement with government actions, and that ultimately goes back to the system of government we have. We elect officials who make policies, allocate money, and are held accountable to the community members who elect them.

It’s true that federal tax dollars pay for ICE agents. It’s also true that they pay for bridges and roads and university research (though that research is also under threat).

“We have a democratic process that elects members of Congress to make those decisions, and it is through that legal mechanism by which taxpayers and voters can affect the choices that the government makes,” Rosenberg said.

Some communities have flirted with more direct ways for voters to have a say in where tax dollars go. Nashville, for example, earmarked $10 million for voters to select citywide improvement projects, but less than less than 2% of the city’s population voted.

Marketplace’s Janet Nguyen broke down what would happen if we were able to choose where exactly our federal tax dollars went and found that more Americans would opt to spend their taxes on social programs like Medicare and Social Security. Thing is, this sort of direct allocation of taxes seems highly unlikely under our current government structure.

Cohen is well aware of the potential consequences of participating in tax resistance (and of doing it in such a public way). She set aside what she owes the federal government in a high-yield savings account and researched the topic a lot before making the decision.

But tax resistance is an action that provides her hope and a sense of agency, Cohen said. For her, it’s a risk worth taking.

“People feel really unrepresented. They feel like no one with any position of power and agency is doing anything,” she said. “These policies are incredibly unpopular — the war in Iran is incredibly unpopular; ICE expansion is incredibly unpopular, and the government just does it anyway. It feels a lot like a moment where you're kind of nudging the person next to you and asking if they're seeing what you're seeing.”