For more than half a century, Joanne Sheehan has refused to give her tax dollars to the U.S. to pay for war. The 76-year-old trainer in nonviolent civil disobedience moved from New York City to Norwich, Conn., in the 1970s, just to make it easier for her to protest the company that builds nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy.
Sheehan has been arrested many times for her activism. Her first arrest was in 1971, when she and fellow tax resisters blockaded the doors of an Internal Revenue Service office to protest the Vietnam War. In 1976, when the IRS came calling after Sheehan refused to pay a 10 percent federal tax on her phone bill, she was already behind bars for a different nonviolent action at the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. The IRS agent left a business card. Sheehan called the agent when she got out of jail to explain her tax resistance.
“They never did get the money,” Sheehan said with glee. She was never prosecuted.
Sheehan, who cofounded the New England regional office of the War Resisters League and runs it out of her Norwich home, is probably what most people think of when they hear the words “tax resister”: a white-haired hippie who has devoted her life to nonviolent activism for lefty causes. But amid recent political strife in the U.S. and globally, including in Vermont, a new generation is dissenting by choosing not to pay taxes.
Lindsey Britt of Brattleboro has been a tax resister for about a decade. For the first few years, the 42-year-old nonprofit administrator refused to pay a portion of her federal income taxes and would send letters to the IRS and Vermont’s congressional delegation explaining her justification. She now resists by reducing her income below a federally taxable level by working part time, growing some of her own food, and bartering with friends and neighbors.
Paying taxes, Britt wrote to the IRS in 2023, supports the government in “killing people, destroying communities, decimating the natural world, and causing a never-ending cycle of trauma.”
Except for when the feds withheld a portion of her federal stimulus check during the pandemic, Britt has never faced legal or financial consequences for her civil disobedience. These days, most tax resisters don’t get penalized, which should come as comforting news to the thousands of Americans who have been exploring this form of civil disobedience as a way of protesting President Donald Trump’s efforts to hobble and dismantle the federal bureaucracy.
Tax resistance seems to be having a moment. Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, and especially since Trump’s reelection, interest in the practice has exploded, according to nonprofit groups that provide free guidance on how to do it ethically and without lying to the IRS.
“So many people who would have never dreamed of it before are actually giving it serious thought,” said Dan DeWalt, a musician, woodworker and teacher from South Newfane. He counts himself among those considering stiffing the IRS for the first time. The 68-year-old political activist has worked on numerous public campaigns to improve government and has always paid his taxes — though maybe not this year.
“Our government has decided to ignore the rule of law,” he said, “so that feels like an invitation for us to do the same.”
No one can say for sure how many Americans refuse to pay their dues to Uncle Sam — nor how much those dues amount to. The IRS doesn’t disclose such information, nor does the Vermont Department of Taxes track that data. But according to Lincoln Rice, coordinator of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, there were at least 10,000 known tax resisters in the 1970s and ’80s. In those years, he said, “The only way to know about tax resistance was to talk to someone who did it.”
Following Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which relied heavily on U.S. military aid, Rice said, his Milwaukee nonprofit saw an “exponential” growth in traffic to its website. Before the war, the website logged 3,300 unique visitors per month. Since Trump’s reelection last November, the website has averaged 22,000 visitors per month and crashed three times last year. Rice has also received a record number of requests for “War Tax Resistance 101” instructional sessions, which he and a colleague host twice a week.
Tax resistance is as old as the U.S. itself.
Prior to the war in Gaza, Rice said, tax resisters were typically white baby boomers. In the past two years, however, most of the new interest has come from people in their twenties and thirties from a variety of backgrounds. Rice gauges the surge, in part, from the nonprofit’s social media sites, particularly Instagram, which tends to skew toward a younger demographic. Prior to October 2023, his organization had about 600 Instagram followers. Today, it has more than 24,000.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee usually goes by its acronym, NWTRCC, pronounced “new trick,” though there’s nothing new about this political cause. Tax resistance is as old as the U.S. itself and has included many famous people in its ranks, from Henry David Thoreau to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Sheehan, the Connecticut activist, was friends with notable war tax resisters Betsy Corner and her husband, Randy Kehler, of Colrain, Mass. After the couple married in 1976, their income was high enough to require them to pay federal taxes. For years, the couple refused and sent letters to the IRS explaining that they would continue paying state and local taxes but were withholding their support of the military-industrial complex. Instead, they would send what they owed to humanitarian causes.
Kehler’s anti-war activism was so influential that Daniel Ellsberg credited him for his decision to leak the Pentagon Papers.
In 1989, after a long public standoff, the IRS finally seized the couple’s Massachusetts home. Federal seizures of tax resisters’ homes and cars were fairly common from the 1970s through most of the 1990s, Rice said, with the IRS taking about 10,000 properties per year. After a federal policy change in 1997, seizures dwindled dramatically and now total fewer than a hundred annually. According to Rice, most are aimed at the “über rich” who deliberately misrepresent their income or try to claim frivolous or fraudulent deductions rather than those who are conscientious objectors. With the IRS, it seems, taking an ethical stand is OK. Lying is not.
A common myth about tax resistance is that the IRS immediately pursues resisters. In fact, the process is ponderously slow and mired in paperwork, and it occurs infrequently, if at all. Rice, a high-profile tax resister who’s been involved with NWTRCC since 1999, has never been criminally charged, threatened with prosecution or had his wages garnished. When Rice speaks to young people about tax resistance, their most common question is, “How is it you’re not in jail?”
Unlike other forms of civil disobedience, in which the police or other authorities may give protesters just one opportunity to walk away before they face legal consequences, tax resisters usually get more leeway.
“You get that first letter from the IRS, and it’s frightening,” said Britt, who belongs to a small group called Taxes for Peace New England, which has about a dozen members. “But you can keep going and see what happens. It’s like being on a train: There are lots of stops where you can choose to get off.”
Another misconception is that tax resistance is an all-or-nothing proposition. As Rice explained, some resisters choose to withhold only a small percentage of their federal taxes and will attach a letter to their tax return explaining their justification. Such letters are becoming less common because most people now file electronically. Still, Rice said, “It’s one of the few times when you send a letter to the federal government that you know someone is going to read.”
The rise of the gig economy has also changed the complexion of tax resistance, since those workers don’t necessarily fill out a W-4 form to report their wages and withholdings to the IRS. Because it’s more complicated to be a tax resister if your employer automatically withholds your federal taxes, NWTRCC offers a free eight-page guide, called “Controlling Federal Income Tax Withholding.” It explains how to calculate your deductions down to zero. Rice strongly urges anyone interested in becoming a tax resister to visit the NWTRCC website so that they understand their rights and the potential consequences.
Make no mistake: Willful refusal to pay your taxes is a crime. According to NWTRCC, the IRS will impose penalties and interest on the amount you owe, which continue to accrue until you pay. The government may also freeze your bank account or other financial assets, garnish your wages, or, in exceedingly rare cases, seize your house or car. But since 1992, the IRS has seized only one house and two cars from tax resisters, both in the 1990s.
The decline in IRS enforcements was a Congressional decision. From 2010 to 2022, it cut the agency’s budget by 24 percent, leading to fewer prosecutions of anyone who didn’t pay their taxes, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Since February, the Trump administration has laid off another 6,000 IRS workers, making it even less likely that tax resisters — and tax cheats — will be punished.
Bob Bady of Brattleboro was one of the unlucky ones. A neighbor of Corner and Kehler in Colrain, Mass., and a war tax resister since 1970, he was part of a multiyear resistance campaign against the IRS. Bady’s house was seized shortly after the same thing happened to his neighbors. Bady also worked for 15 years as a registered nurse — until the IRS tried garnishing his wages and he quit.
But the biggest consequence Bady has endured is “not having middle-class economic security,” he said. At age 72, he still does manual labor to pay the bills. “On the other hand, I feel good about what I’ve done all my life.”
Bady still urges his fellow Vermonters to become tax resisters — and be very public about it. While he understands the desire to keep quiet and avoid trouble, “There are consequences to nonviolent civil disobedience. It’s what makes it powerful,” he said. “If it’s safe and non-consequential, it’s pretty meaningless.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “No Returns | Since the war in Gaza and Trump’s reelection, public interest in tax resistance is booming”
This article appears in The Money & Retirement Issue 2025.
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