Federal taxes are due on April 15, but a growing number of Americans are refusing to pay as an act of resistance against President Donald Trump’s administration.
Attorney Rachel Cohen is one of them. Cohen is an organizer who has been pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed for protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s violent deportations. This year, she decided she needed to withhold payment of her federal tax dollars as another form of protest.
“I found myself sitting questioning, how on earth I could hold the truth of ‘I think this is worth bodily harm to protest and resist,’ and also ‘I’m going to turn over thousands of dollars that will go in part to funding this,’” Cohen told HuffPost. Cohen was already planning to do this before the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran in March. However, she said the ongoing Iran war “really affirmed my decision.”
She posted about her decision not to pay over $8,800 in federal income taxes publicly on social media and her Substack. “I’m not encouraging anyone else to do this,” Cohen said, but the lack of knowledge over this type of protest “was why I decided to talk about this publicly.”
Approximately half of the United States’ discretionary budget goes to “defense,” including at the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, according to war research published by Brown University. For tax resisters, using taxpayers’ dollars to fund military government spending is a morally unconscionable act under Trump’s administration.
