Oct. 2, 2006 – Page 2612
There is no better symbol of citizen disgust with public inefficiency than long lines at any Department of Motor Vehicles office. One comedian recently joked that if President Bush really wants to get the evildoers to talk, he should transfer detainees being held in secret CIA prisons to the DMV in New York to stand in line and fill out forms.
So, just imagine the reaction folks will have 20 months from now when DMVs across the country start sending renewal notices to all 245 million or so citizens who have driver’s licenses. They will say that all license renewals must happen in person — rather than through the mail or on a government Web site — and that people must bring valid documentary evidence proving citizenship or that they are in the country legally; a photo identification; proof of their birth date; a Social Security card, and something showing the address of their principal residence. They will also probably have to pay a larger fee to cover some of the higher costs.
Each state is then supposed to verify all that information with other issuing agencies, such as the Social Security Administration, then retain paper copies of the source documents for seven years and digital images for a decade. And the states are to connect to a national database to verify the identity of everyone in the country allowed to drive a vehicle.
A federal law enacted last year spells all this out. Washington can’t flatly dictate such requirements to the states, but it can come up with powerful incentives for going along: In this case, the licenses issued by states that don’t comply will not be recognized by federal authorities, so getting past security at airports would prove impossible.
“Once we start to tell Californians that they have to march to the DMV, show proof of birth and proof of residency, all hell will break loose,” state Senate President Don Perata of Oakland complained to the San Diego Union-Tribune. “No one will look at George Bush to blame. They’re going to look at who’s doing this — the DMV.”
That most likely was just the intention. Citizens, and that means voters, are going to be mad as hell, not only because of the inconvenience but also because of privacy concerns. There is a tradition of institutional opposition to any kind of national identification card that goes way back to the founding of Social Security during the New Deal. And the new licensing program, known as “Real ID,” clearly will result in just that: national identification cards. Congress simply unloaded both the political burden and the task of providing them onto the states, in effect turning state DMV workers into the front-line agents for the Department of Homeland Security.
It’s instructive to review how all this happened. Congress originally endorsed a different plan as part of the intelligence overhaul law almost two years ago, giving states much more of a say in how to establish the first federal standards for state-issued licenses. State officials grumbled, but at least they were involved in writing the rules. But only five months later, House Judiciary Chairman
This is the same guy who was the driving force behind the immigration bill the House passed this spring, in which he wrote language that nothing in that legislation “shall be construed to authorize . . . the establishment of a national identification card.” Hardly necessary, since Congress already forced the states to do it.
Congress also may stick them with the bill, estimated to be as much as $11 billion over five years, in contrast to the $40 million the act authorized in federal assistance. And the states would have to comply by May 2008, even though the federal departments of Homeland Security and Transportation won’t be able to issue specific guidelines for what states must do until the end of this year.
State officials are all too aware of how long it can take to plan, purchase and implement the kind of sophisticated systems required to pull off Real ID successfully. “We’re into year 11 of a three-year computer upgrade,” quips Maine’s secretary of State, Matthew Dunlap. To expect it will happen so fast is “absurd,” warns Larry Dzieza, the budget director for Washington state’s Department of Licensing. “Five to 10 to 15 years is more like it.”
The privacy concerns unite everyone: libertarians, liberals, even some fundamentalist Christians who believe that Real ID is a sign of the coming apocalypse. For more practical reasons, governors of both parties also are united in opposition, both because they don’t care for the cavalier way Washington sticks it to them, but also because they know that there is little chance their DMVs, which have only recently shown significant improvement, can do so much so fast.
Real ID “is an issue that touches on federalism, security, safety, immigration, privacy and mandates,” notes Anne Witt, the DMV chief in Washington, D.C., and head of a task force on the new law for her national association. “The implication is that everyone will start over. Everyone is going to have to do this from scratch.”
Peter Harkness is the editor and publisher of Governing magazine, published by Congressional Quarterly Inc.