https://chrisgiven.com/2025/06/saying-goodbye/
When the Treasury Department ordered the Direct File team to stop work and disband, the toughest part was saying goodbye.
Direct File deserves an Ocean’s Eleven-style montage for assembling the team. The old partner who had to be convinced to come back for one more job (the best, and perpetually most reluctant, user experience lead in the business). The loose cannon I was wary of bringing onto the team due to a checkered past (a brilliant engineer with a crypto startup on his resume). The whiz kid with the precise set of skills needed to pull off the plan (an interaction designer by training, she and I had studied up on tax law together, and she took to it like a fish to water).
We came together, a band of misfits and weirdos, under the banner of a fantastical, improbable mission. It felt like we were unstoppable. And then we were stopped.
And as much as we had accomplished, we knew we were just getting started. So we did our best to document what we had learned. We prepared the project for hibernation, writing notes for a future team that might never come. We said goodbye.
It was August 2022.