This fall, the Department of Homeland Security and its pro-national ID allies staged a push to move more states toward complying with REAL ID, the U.S. national ID law. The public agitation effort was so successful that passport offices in New Mexico were swamped with people fearing their drivers’ licenses would be invalid for federal purposes. A DHS official had to backtrack on a widely reported January 2016 deadline for state compliance.
DHS continues to imply that all but a few holdout states stand in the way of nationwide REAL ID compliance. The suggestion is that residents of recalcitrant jurisdictions will be hung out to dry soon, when the Transportation Security Administration starts turning away travelers who arrive at its airport checkpoints with IDs from non-compliant states.
At this writing, DHS’s “REAL ID Enforcement in Brief” page lists just two non-compliant jurisdictions: Minnesota and American Samoa. You’d take this as a signal of broad compliance. But look closely at the list of “Compliant/Extension” jurisdictions, and you see that more than half of them are non-compliant and enjoying extensions themselves.
But here’s the kicker: Even the ‘compliant’ states aren’t compliant. DHS treats states as ‘compliant’ if they’re synched up with a pared-back “material compliance checklist.” It’s DHS reducing the obligations of the law by fiat, and it’s no different than extending the deadline indefinitely on a subset of the law’s actual requirements.
When DHS bureaucrats tell state elected officials that the agency can no longer offer them extensions, this is false. DHS is currently giving every state in the union, including the ones it calls “compliant,” extensions with respect to provisions of the law and regulations that don’t appear on its checklist.
To help clarify what REAL ID compliance actually is, we’ve compiled a list of REAL ID’s actual requirements, what the law and regulations would mean for states. REAL ID has nearly 100 requirements, ranging from very easy, standard ID-card practices to things that are currently impossible and ill-advised. States have to do all of them to be compliant.
We’ve grouped the requirements together for easy reading. Many are back-end mandates, requiring states to meet standards for facilities, data storage, employee background checks, and so forth. Notably, REAL ID requires states to make driver data available to every other state, which means that every DMV must open its state’s residents’ data to the risk of exposure to any state that lacks sufficient information controls. That ill-advised policy is currently impossible, luckily, because the data sharing network has not yet been built. Congress puts money into the project annually in the DHS appropriations bill.
The full REAL ID requirements make it easy to see why no state is in compliance today, and why no state should expend their taxpayers’ money on the onerous, complex scheme to implement the U.S. national ID law.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/what-real-real-id-compliance
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