Recapping the Costs of the REAL ID Revival Bill
In late July, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee passed a new version of PASS ID, the REAL ID revival bill. I’ve posted about various dimensions of it: the national ID question, the politics of PASS ID, whether PASS ID protects privacy, a run-down of the Senate hearing on it, and the inexplicable support of the Center for Democracy and Technology for this national ID law.
Three months later, the committee still has not reported the bill, meaning that the public doesn’t get access to the version the committee passed. (A resolution in the House would require committees there to publish amendments to bills within 24 hours.) But the Congressional Budget Office scored the bill this week. That is often a signal that legislation is on the move.
So it’s a good time to look at costs again. The National Governors Association and the National Conference of State Legislatures both premised their support for PASS ID on the idea that it would reduce costs to states to just $2 billion.
But in July I examined the likely costs of PASS ID and NGA’s cost calculations. To save you a burdensome click, here are some highlights:
The Best Defense against National Standards? Hearing about National Standards
I’ll admit it: When I go to an event intended to tout an idea I think is wrong, I get a little nervous. What if I hear an argument that’s so convincing it forces me to totally reevaluate my position? All my work will have been for naught! Well, I had just such worries as I headed toward the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s “International Evidence about National Standards” conference yesterday.
I needn’t have worried. What I heard made me even more certain that imposing national academic standards – whether through state compacts, or worse, “incentivized” with federal dollars – is doomed to failure, just as I have been saying for years.
First, there’s likely political failure. Yes, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and other high-profile education folks have recently been talking about the need for common standards – or at least the folly of having 50 different state standards – and many people think national standards would be great. But though people may love the idea of national standards, when it comes to actually creating and implementing them, love quickly turns to anger.
The second panel of the day, featuring Dane Linn of the National Governors Association and Gene Wilhoit of the Council of Chief State School Officers – whose organizations are working together to create national standards – made this abundantly clear. While people at the conference might have agreed that national standards are peachy in theory, they couldn’t agree at all on who should write them. Indeed, they couldn’t even agree on their general shape: While Linn and Wilhoit stressed the need for higher and narrower standards, the Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli, who moderated the panel, said that his group, the conference convener, could very well find itself opposing narrow standards that include too little.
If you can’t get people who really believe that we need national standards to agree on even their basic shape, why would anyone think that they could get a majority of Americans to agree on a single standard?
The REAL ID Revival Bill Should Not Get a PASS
A draft Senate bill to revive the REAL ID Act has been leaked to to the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies, and they find it wanting.
The bill is an attempt to smooth down REAL ID and make the national ID law more palatable. CIS is unhappy because they want a national ID implemented right away.
REAL ID is, of course, failing. Just ten months ago, the Bush Administration’s Secretary of Homeland Security granted waivers to every state in the country – not a single one of them was in compliance by the May, 2008 deadline, and several have statutorily barred themselves from complying.
Legislation to repeal REAL ID in both the House and Senate was introduced in the last Congress, but with an administration and Department of Homeland Security eager to demagogue the issue against a Democratic Congress, that legislation did not move. Repealing REAL ID would not have the same problem in the current Congress.
But since then, Washington’s wheels have been turning. The National Governors Association has turned into an advocate of reviving REAL ID because it hopes that federal dollars will flow behind federal mandates. They won’t, but reviving REAL ID will cement NGA’s role as a beggar for federal dollars in Washington. (Maybe other state legislator groups, as well.)
Everbody in Washington, D.C. salivates over the chance to make “deals” even if that means switching positions on issues of principle like whether the U.S. should have a national ID. We’ll be watching to see which political leaders reverse themselves and support this attempt at a national ID for their love of political dealmaking.
The working name of the REAL ID revival bill is the “PASS ID Act.” It should not be given a pass by opponents of a U.S. national ID and the REAL ID Act.
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