The worst part is that it had been working just fine for me before. I already had a login that I think had been verified via postal mail. My IRS account obviously isn't going anywhere. Why do I have to create a completely new login, just to use less secure surveillance based authentication? It smells of corruption where someone gets a kickback based on how many people they can herd into the surveillance industry slaughterhouse. There are probably several layers of indirection (grift) because "government can't do anything", but that's still the underlying dynamic.
If I had to guess, the kickback isn’t from the auth provider.
Maintaining a system takes people & resources. For 40+ years, there’s a push to not allow the government to actually hire and manage those itself, but use commercial entities, because “big government is bad”.
So it is easier to get the approval to pay x2 as much for a 3rd party than do it for half the budget internally. And as things need to be done, you end up saying f*k it and help ruin public service because it was mandated you’ll do so.
And then you end up with shitty services, which was the intent all along: it’s not about big government, it’s about outsourcing government contracts to you and yours.
