Today is tax day, and like every tax season, Americans have collectively spent billions of dollars and millions of hours preparing their taxes for federal and state governments.

But in the future, there’s a chance that thing could look different for a large number of American taxpayers: Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation that would require the Internal Revenue Service to provide American taxpayers with tax forms that are automatically filled out in advance. This is called return-free filing, and it means that the IRS populates tax forms with the information it already gathers, by law, from employers. And it’s hasn’t always been a liberal issue: Ronald Reagan, in a 1985 speech, praised the idea of return-free filing.

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Joseph Bankman, a professor of tax law at Stanford Law School who has been an advocate for return-free filing, says that while state programs are useful, a federal program would be better, because that’s the one that people almost always fill out first. Bankman was one of the creators, in 2005, of California’s ReadyReturn, another return-free program that has since been rolled into CalFile. According to the Franchise Tax Board of California, 97 percent of those who used ReadyReturn said they’d use it again, and ReadyReturn filers were significantly less likely to have errors in their returns.