(The Epoch Times)—The 2026 tax filing season is due to start in January as Trump administration officials have predicted that it will lead to significant tax refunds for most Americans.
However, several other changes will be coming as taxpayers start to file their taxes in the coming weeks. The tax filing start date has not yet been officially announced, although it’s expected to start in late January.
Direct File No More
The IRS Direct File, an electronic system for filing tax returns established under the Biden administration, will not be offered in 2026, officials have said.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is also the IRS commissioner, said in November that the service “wasn’t used very much” and “better alternatives” exist.
The Direct File pilot program was started in tax year 2023, and as of April 20, 2025, 296,531 returns were filed by users and accepted by the tax agency through the program, according to a recent Treasury Department report.
New Mileage Rates Coming
The IRS announced Monday that beginning Jan. 1, the standard mileage rate for a qualifying vehicle will be 72.5 cents per mile, up 2.5 cents from 2025.
The rate will be 20.5 cents per mile driven for medical purposes, down a half cent from 2025 and will be 20.5 cents per mile driven for moving purposes for certain active-duty members of the military and certain members of the intelligence community, a half-cent reduction from last year.
The change, meant to reflect updated cost data and annual inflation adjustments, applies to fully electric and hybrid automobiles, and gas and diesel-powered vehicles.
Larger Refunds Likely Coming, Officials Say
Officials including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have predicted that American workers will see greater spending power due to tax refunds that were included in a federal law that was passed over the summer.
Speaking to the “All-In Podcast” last week, Bessent said that workers will see changes to their tax withholdings starting next year due to a provision under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“They will change their withholding schedule at the beginning of the year and they will get an automatic increase in real wages,” he said. “So I think that’s going to be a very powerful combo.”
The Trump administration-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains several income tax provisions including an increase to the child tax credit, an increase to the standard deduction, a state and local tax (SALT) deduction limit, and also deductions on auto loan interest. Other provisions include tax cuts on overtime and tip income as well as a new deduction for seniors who receive Social Security payments and have to pax taxes on those earnings.
The secretary also again predicted that households will see $1,000 to $2,000 in refunds next year.
“I think that’s going to be a very powerful combo of corporate and individuals,” he said, referring to taxes.
The CEO of the IRS, Frank Bisignano, also said in an interview with Fox Business that around 94 percent of middle-class taxpayers will see higher returns.
Roughly $800 Average Boost
The nonpartisan Tax Foundation also echoed Trump administration forecasts that many Americans will shoulder a lower tax burden next year, predicting that the average refund will be around $800 next year.
“When taxpayers file their 2025 tax returns in 2026, many will see larger refunds than in recent years. That’s due to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which reduced individual income taxes for 2025 by an estimated $144 billion,” the Tax Foundation’s Erica York said in an analysis released in mid-December.
York added that because the IRS did not adjust its withholding tables after the passage of the law, “workers generally continued to withhold more taxes from their paychecks than the new law required.”
“As a result, instead of gradually receiving the benefit of the tax cuts through higher take-home pay during the year, most taxpayers will receive it all at once when they file their returns,” she said.
Less Tax on Tips or Overtime
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act says that workers who get tips will be able to deduct up to $25,000 in tips if they make less than $150,000, or $300,000 if they’re married and filing jointly. The amount workers can deduct is reduced by $100 for every $1,000 they make over $150,000.
Overtime workers can deduct up to $12,500 in overtime or up to $25,000 in a joint return. Like the tip measure, the amount workers can deduct is reduced if they make more than $150,000. And they must include a Social Security number when they file.
Trump Accounts
Also part of the tax and spending bill, so-called “Trump Accounts” will be rolled out starting next year. The program gives a $1,000 bonus to babies born during the calendar years of the Trump administration, and multiple billionaires including Michael Dell and Ray Dalio have contributed funds to the accounts so far.
During an interview in mid-December, Bessent said parents whose children are eligible for the program will be able to select a newly made IRS form to claim it as they file their taxes.
“To claim this investment, most families need merely to check a box on Form 4547,” he said, referring to the IRS form.
The Treasury hasn’t yet launched the Trump Accounts. Bessent said that they would go into effect on July 4, 2026.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
