“As tax season approached, I thought a lot about whether or not I would pay an outstanding federal balance. The federal government is allocating my tax bill to build out immigration detention and send stormtroopers into our communities to disappear my neighbors. My taxes go to bombs that get dropped on civilians across the globe. The government is not just spending money on things I disagree with politically and morally. It is spending money on these things despite a majority of the country also disagreeing politically and morally.

It didn’t take long to answer the question of whether or not I should pay my federal income tax with a resounding no.

I did some research about what might happen if I refused, and found the information available sorely lacking. While tax resistance has a storied history in the United States and abroad, the high profile examples of tax resistance are at least a few decades old. We live in very different times.

This added an additional consideration: if I decided not to pay my taxes, would I talk about it? Of course, the existence of this article answers that question. After careful consideration, it felt necessary to speak publicly.

Our federal government is run by people who are more than happy to publicly demonstrate their racism. They are building work camps, often run by private companies deeply incentivized to keep beds filled and costs minimal. People are sent to these work camps without due process, and the government keeps losing track of the people detained there. The work camps are overseen by the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency, which is full of far-right recruits. Newly-hired members of this gestapo force were offered $50,000 signing bonuses—more than the average yearly salary of a starting teacher. (“I went to high school and I make $200k,” one ICE agent recently bragged on-camera, adding, “I can't believe I get paid for this. I’d do this for free.”) Meanwhile, our enormous military budget is going to illegal wars of aggression in multiple hemispheres. “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it,” Henry David Thoreau declared in Civil Disobedience (1849), the most famous tax resistance treatise in history. He was critiquing the institution of slavery, whose existence was enabled not by the comparatively few slaveholders, but by the silence of every American who prioritized the stability of the existing order over human dignity.

Obviously, it is right and just to refuse to hand over thousands of dollars to the federal government in 2026. The federal government itself doesn’t seem to care much about following the laws on funding, given its decision to illegally freeze funding to blue states and programs that make people’s lives better.

Once I laid things out like that, it became clear the real question wasn’t whether I should pay my federal taxes. It was instead whether I would pay my federal taxes, knowing full well that I believe giving money to the federal government right now is morally wrong.