Former users will find that login access is gone, and anyone needing a copy of a previously filed return must now submit Form 4506 to request it directly from the IRS.
Initially launched under the Inflation Reduction Act and expanded for 2025, Direct File received high satisfaction ratings from taxpayers. However, political and industry opposition led to its removal. For most individuals, this means turning once again to professional tax preparers or commercial software for 2026 filings.
What this means for you and how to prepare for 2026:
💼 1. Retrieve past filings early.
If you used Direct File, request your 2024 or 2025 return now via Form 4506 to avoid delays when preparing next year’s tax documents.
🧾 2. Re-evaluate your filing strategy.
With the end of Direct File, this is the time to reassess whether your current approach, DIY software vs. professional preparation, still aligns with your goals and complexity level.
📊 3. Plan ahead for potential cost and compliance changes.
Expect updates to filing procedures, software pricing, and possibly new requirements stemming from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Early planning ensures you stay compliant and minimize surprises.
🤝 4. Leverage proactive tax planning.
Use this transition as an opportunity to review your 2025 results, identify planning opportunities, and set strategies for the 2026 season — especially if your income or business structure has changed.
SHUTDOWN DISRUPTS FOOD STAMP PAYMENTS
Marketing genius or marketing fail? Starbucks’ Bearista Cup moment ☕️🐻
Starbucks did what Starbucks does best: create a moment.
Their new Bearista Cup (the adorable bear-shaped one) sold out in hours, resold online for over $400, and even caused chaos in some stores. But here’s the catch: most locations reportedly only received 2-3 cups each.
So now we have to ask, was this marketing genius or a marketing fail?
Scarcity drives demand, but it can also drive frustration.
On one hand, Starbucks nailed the hype formula with limited supply, high emotional value, and nostalgic timing that created instant cultural buzz. Everyone was talking about it.
On the other hand, customers left disappointed, baristas were overwhelmed, and brand loyalty was tested in real time.
Here’s the real lesson:
✨ Exclusivity builds excitement.
💡 Expectation builds trust.
When those two don’t align, the moment can quickly shift from viral to volatile.
For marketers and creators, it’s the balance we all have to master. How do you make people want in without making them feel left out?
Jimmy Donaldson, the multi-hyphenate entrepreneur better known as social influencer MrBeast, is adding another job to his growing resume: Theme park founder.
Donaldson, in a social media post, announced the forthcoming opening of "Beast Land" on Nov. 13 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The park will be a temporary attraction and will run through Dec. 27.
“Next week, Beast Land, our brand new theme park, opens!!!!” Donaldson wrote in a social media post. “We built custom games modeled after our videos that don’t exist ANYWHERE else, and will have the world’s largest prize wall. … I didn’t want this to be like a typical theme park. Thought of things from first principles and created games I would love to play!"
Beast Land won't be a theme park as most people envision them. It will be comprised of two zones: Beast Land and Beast Arena.
Beast Land will be a themed world with rides, games, food, and merchandise, he said. Beast Arena will be filled with custom games, such as one called "Tower Siege," where players load balls into catapults to land them in 60-foot tubes for points. Competitors will collect daily prizes and compete for an undisclosed grand prize.
Another attraction called Airmail is zipline-inspired. "I made a game for people who like zip lines called Airmail! you basically have to drop a weighted bag on to a target below. Closer to the middle, the more points you get," he wrote.
Admission to the park will cost $7, but that won't cover rides, games, experiences, or other activities. Attendees can also purchase the Beast Mode ticket, which gives access to games, challenges, and 3 rides for $25, or the Beast Mode + ticket, giving you access to everything for $66.
Some fans pressed Donaldson on choosing Saudi Arabia for the park's location, citing the country's history of human rights abuses. Donaldson defended the location, saying it was in the "middle of the world" and that "a majority of my audience is outside America and we have a big Middle Eastern fan base."
The United States was just 42 years old when the first Farmer's Almanac was published in 1818. Ever since then, the publication has been a constant, no matter what ups or downs the country was facing. But that remarkable streak will come to an end next year.
The publishers of the Farmer's Almanac have announced that next year's edition of the publication, best known for its long-range weather predictions, will be its last.
"It is with deep appreciation and heartfelt emotions that we share some sad news with you today," the publication wrote in a social media post. "The 2026 Farmers’ Almanac will be our last edition ever. We are so grateful to have been part of your life. We will miss sharing the unique blend of wit, weather, and wisdom that you’ve grown accustomed to. Our wish for you is to keep tending to what’s important. Keep watching the weather and awe-inspiring sunrises and sunsets. Thank you for your support."
The publication did not give a reason for the decision to cease publication. It said the website would be shutting down by the end of the year and all social media posts would be ending, but added, "stay tuned here for more updates" at the end of the announcement, which some readers are clinging to in hopes that the end might be more of a transformation.
For more than two centuries, the Farmer's Almanac has offered readers weather predictions for the year to come (which it has claimed were 80% accurate but a 2010 University of Illinois study found to be closer to 52%), gardening advice and astronomical tips.
"We’re grateful to have been part of your life and trust that you’ll help keep the spirit of the Almanac alive," wrote editor Sandi Duncan and editor emeritus Peter Geiger to readers. "So go ahead—plant your peas when the daffodils bloom. Watch for a red sky at night. Tell the kids how granddad always swore by the Almanac. That’s how our story stays alive."
The Farmer's Almanac is different from The Old Farmer's Almanac, a separate publication that has been around since 1792. That publication will continue.
The US Supreme Court late Friday entered the increasingly confusing — and desperate — circumstances surrounding the country’s primary food aid program when it blocked a federal judge’s order in Rhode Island that the Trump administration provide full monthly food stamp benefits to 42 million low-income and disabled people.
The high court’s intervention just before 9:30 p.m. Friday follows a day in which the US Department of Agriculture said it is “working towards” a court order that it pay full benefits for the program through November.
A federal appeals court in Boston had refused to immediately intervene, saying in a ruling Friday that the government could not justify that it needed an “administrative stay” because it did not argue that it could not pay at least some of the benefits through November. The court said it would decide the overall merits of the case “as quickly as possible.”
Then, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson granted an emergency request by the administration to hold off on the payments until the appeals court could fully weigh in.
Jackson said she expected the appeals court to decide “with dispatch,” according to SCOTUSBlog, which tracks the high court’s decisions.
It’s unclear how the Supreme Court intervention would affect a payment process that is already underway, although at a minimum, the confusing situation for recipients who are fast running out of options for food is likely to only worsen.
Governor Maura Healey said Massachusetts had already begun processing the funds, and recipients would begin receiving their delayed benefits as early as Saturday, a week after they were first withheld. Multiple other states had also said they expected recipients to receive their benefits imminently.
After Jackson’s ruling, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell said in a statement that she would continue to challenge the Trump administration’s move to block SNAP funding “to ensure our residents have access to food.”
“The Trump Administration has the money to fully fund the SNAP program but is on a mission to withhold that funding so that they can continue to use the hunger of 42 million Americans as a bargaining chip,” said Campbell, who joined 24 other states and the District of Columbia in a separate, similar lawsuit that is pending in federal court in Boston.
About one in every eight Americans relies on the federal program for food assistance, an $8 billion monthly expenditure the Trump administration sought to stop amid the government shutdown.
The on-again, off-again situation stems from a series of rulings by the Rhode Island federal judge, the most recent coming on Thursday, that effectively ordered the USDA to find money from some of its other accounts to fund November SNAP payments. The administration has consistently argued that the government shutdown has left it without appropriations to finance the benefits, and that only congressional action can restore the money.
“A single District Court in Rhode Island should not be able to seize center stage in the shutdown,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a post on X.
Even as Healey and officials from other states said their administrations would begin processing food benefits, some advocates were wary the legal battle was over.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Liz O’Gilvie, who heads two anti-hunger organizations in Springfield. O’Gilvie said Friday that she was at a meeting of Healey’s anti-hunger task force when the Trump administration indicated that it would comply with the lower court order to fund benefits for November.
A number of other states, including California, Rhode Island, Oregon, and Wisconsin, had also begun distributing full benefits for their residents despite the lingering legal jockeying.
In New Hampshire, Laura Milliken of NH Hunger Solutions on Friday confirmed that “full benefits will go out tomorrow,” but warned it may take up to 48 hours to appear on recipients' EBT cards. Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee said Friday night his state, too, was “moving forward with the process” to release full federal SNAP benefits for November.
In Massachusetts, more than 1 million people receive food stamps. And in her announcement earlier Friday, Healey said recipients had been used as pawns in Trump’s battle with congressional Democrats over the government shutdown.
“President Trump should never have put the American people in this position,” Healey said in a statement Friday.
For people in the field, such as O’Gilvie, who spoke before the Supreme Court intervention, there are still more questions than answers.
“We all have our fingers crossed,” she said, noting it was unclear whether payments would be on time for the rest of the month. “For the people who normally get them next week, will they get them on time? And the court order was only for November payments. What about December?”
Trisha Flynn, a 45-year-old mother of two boys who lives in Lowell, relies on meals at her local church after her SNAP benefits run out each month. She said she still expected to rely on church meals for a few weeks, even with full benefits, saying it takes $300 to fill her fridge.
“I have an 11-year-old and a 17-year-old, and in a week and a half it’s gone,” Flynn said. “And then I’ll be back to where I was before this started.”
She, too, said she was skeptical the benefits would be released.
Trump ”keeps saying that he’ll do this, and then something changes,” Flynn said. “It’s like cat and mouse.”
The Trump administration had previously agreed to dip into a contingency fund to provide $4 billion for partial SNAP payments in November. But US Department of Justice lawyers argued that Thursday’s ruling that it use other sources “makes a mockery of the separation of powers.”
With uncertainty around SNAP benefits, state and local officials have been urging people to support food banks as they and other states have sought ways to fill some of the gap.
Healey last week said the state would double its support for food banks and pantries by advancing $4 million in funds. The city of Boston and The Boston Foundation nonprofit have raised or committed nearly $1.8 million more.
Massachusetts state officials, however, have long contended that they can’t begin to plug the more than $200 million in monthly SNAP funding upon which residents rely with state funding.
Zach Goldhammer of the Cambridge Community Center, which runs a food pantry, says the restoration of baseline benefits should not lead people to believe that food insecurity is suddenly solved.
“It’s great that these services are being restored; it’s obviously needed,” Goldhammer said Friday before the Supreme Court appeal. “But there’s still a lot more that’s needed.”
When Carly Kaprive left a job in Kansas City and moved to Chicago a year ago, she figured it would take three to six months to find a new position. After all, the 32-year-old project manager had never been unemployed for longer than three months.
Instead, after 700 applications, she’s still looking, wrapped up in a frustrating and extended job hunt that is much more difficult than when she last looked for work just a couple of years ago. With uncertainty over interest rates, tariffs, immigration, and artificial intelligence roiling much of the economy, some companies she’s interviewed with have abruptly decided not to fill the job at all.
“I have definitely had mid-interview roles be eliminated entirely, so they are not going to move forward with even hiring anybody,” she said.
Kaprive is caught in a historical anomaly: The unemployment rate is low and the economy is still growing, but those out of work face the slowest pace of hiring in more than a decade. Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, calls it a “jobless boom.”
While big corporate layoff announcements typically grab the most attention, it has been the unwillingness of many companies to add workers that has created a more painful job market than the low 4.3% unemployment rate would suggest. It is also more bifurcated: The “low hire, low fire” economy has meant fewer layoffs for those with jobs, while the unemployed struggle to find work.
“It’s like an insider-outsider thing,” Guy Berger, head of research at the Burning Glass Institute, said, “where outsiders that need jobs are struggling to get their foot in, even as insiders are insulated by what up until now is a low-layoff environment.”
Several large companies have recently announced tens of thousands of job cuts in the past few weeks, including UPS, Target, and IBM, though Berger said it is too soon to tell whether they signal a turn for the worse in the economy. But a rise in job cuts would be particularly challenging with hiring already so low.
For now, it’s harder than ever to get a clear read on the job market because the government shutdown has cut off the U.S. Department of Labor’s monthly employment reports. The October jobs report was scheduled for release on Friday but has been delayed, like the September figures before it. The October report may be less comprehensive when it is released because not all the data may be collected.
Before the shutdown, the Labor Department reported that the hiring rate — the number of people hired in a given month, as a percentage of those employed — fell to 3.2% in August, matching the lowest figure outside the pandemic since March 2013.
Back then, the unemployment rate was a painful 7.5%, as the economy slowly recovered from the job losses from the 2008-2009 Great Recession. That is much higher than August’s 4.3%.
Many of those out of work are skeptical of the current low rate. Brad Mislow, 54, has been mostly unemployed for the past three years after losing a job as an advertising executive in New York City. Now he is substitute teaching to make ends meet.
“It is frustrating to hear that the unemployment rate is low, the economy is great,” he said. “I think there are people in this economy who are basically fighting every day and holding on to pieces of flotsam in the shark-filled waters or, they have no idea what it’s like.”
With the government closed, financial markets are paying closer attention to private-sector data, but that is also mixed. On Thursday, the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas unnerved investors with a report that announced job cuts surged 175% in October from a year ago.
Yet on Wednesday, payroll processor ADP said that net hiring picked up in October as businesses added 42,000 jobs, after two months of declines. Still, the gain was modest. ADP’s figures are based on anonymous data from the 26 million workers at its client companies.
Separately, Revelio Labs, a workplace analytics company, estimated Thursday that the economy shed 9,000 jobs in October. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago estimates that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4% last month.
Even when the government was releasing data, economists and officials at the Federal Reserve weren’t sure how healthy the job market was or where it was headed next. A sharp drop in immigration and stepped-up deportations have helped keep the unemployment rate low simply by reducing the supply of workers. The economy doesn’t need to create as many jobs to keep the unemployment rate from rising.
Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, has called in a “curious balance” because both the supply of and demand for workers has fallen.
Economists point to many reasons for the hiring slowdown, but most share a common thread: Greater uncertainty from tariffs, the potential impact of artificial intelligence, and now the government shutdown. While investment in data centers to power AI is booming, elevated interest rates have kept many other parts of the economy weak, such as manufacturing and housing.
“The concentration of economic gains (in AI) has left the economy looking better on paper than it feels to most Americans,” Swonk said.
Recent college graduates have borne the brunt of the hiring slowdown, but it’s been a struggle for workers at all ages.
Suzanne Elder, 65, is an operations executive with extensive experience in health care, and two years ago, the Chicago resident also found work quickly when she sought to switch jobs. She had three job offers within three months. But now she’s been unemployed ever since a layoff in April.
She is worried that her age is a challenge, but isn’t letting it hold her back. “I got a job at 63, so I don’t see a reason to not get a job at 65,” she said.
Like many job-hunters, she has been stunned by the impersonal responses from recruiters, often driven by hiring software. She received an email from a company that thanked her for speaking with them, though she never had an interview. Another company that never responded to her resume asked her to fill out a survey about their interaction.
Weak hiring has meant unemployment spells are getting longer, according to government data. More than one-quarter of those out of work have been unemployed for more than six months or longer, a figure that rose sharply in July and August and is up from 21% a year ago.
Swonk said that such increases are unusual outside recessions.
A rising number of the unemployed have also given up on their job searches, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. That also holds down the unemployment rate because people who stop looking aren’t counted as unemployed.
But Kaprive is still sticking with it — she’s taken classes about Amazon’s web services platform to boost her technology skills.
“We can’t be narrow-minded in what we’re willing to take,” she said.