According to a slew of minor media reports, one year remains before the REAL ID deadline. On May 7, 2025, the story goes, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will begin turning American travelers away at airports if they don’t have an ID card that meets federal standards.

Well, there are government programs, and there are laws. The operative law here is a law of politics: Don’t anger the people. 

That means that the REAL ID deadline will recede once again, as it has time and again since Congress passed a statute creating a national ID. Congress tasked the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with implementing it by commandeering state identification policy and state departments of motor vehicles.

Let’s review: In the urgent years after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission) wrote a few words about identity documents. (The 9/11 terrorists futzed around with fraudulently acquired IDs, but not in a way that materially advanced the plot.) The Commission gave three‐quarters of a page out of more than 400 substantive pages to identity security. Its entire treatment of the subject is on page 390.

Importantly, REAL ID would not cost-effectively secure against terrorism. It would waste privacy and erode civil liberties for no effective gain. (I wrote a book on identification some years back.)

REAL ID was not a 9/11 Commission recommendation. The REAL ID Act repealed the provisions in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 that Congress had passed in response to the 9/11 Commission’s thinking. REAL ID canceled a negotiated rulemaking process that was enlisting input from state motor vehicle administrators, privacy advocates, and others who may have cobbled together sensible identification policies consistent with American values.

Much of the regulatory juking—how “compliance” has changed in regulators’ hands, for example—I covered in a post a couple of years ago. Long story short, the original REAL ID deadline of May 2008 has given way over and over. “REAL ID is dead,” I wrote in a history of the drawn-out process a decade ago, “but it is walking dead.”

REAL ID is still dead, and it is still walking around. That is a product of political incentives in our democracy.

The substantive reason why REAL ID is dead I discussed above and in the referenced book. It does not cost-effectively improve security. Popular intuitions about a national ID are correct. Those intuitions have defeated REAL ID in a de facto sense, because it’s a retail program. The federal government has to go through the states to each of the people and get them registered. That’s costly and politically perilous. It would be even more perilous to push the issue by turning people away at airports.

Collectively, TSA and DHS have done these calculations. They know that a fight over REAL ID compliance would be a losing battle. REAL ID deadlines will recede until there is so much compliance that only a miniscule group of travelers would have to be inconvenienced. The playbook is to use these false deadlines to move more and more people into REAL ID, with the hope that someday they can actually force compliance on a tiny number of holdouts.

But if the policy is so bad, why is it still alive? That’s a product of another set of incentives. Taxpayer dollars are so easy to come by that state and federal legislators do not regard the billions they have spent on REAL ID as significant. They recognize that some kind of security incident that can be plausibly related to IDs (as 9/11 was) is a political risk for them. Who wants to take a vote that will be used against them (even unfairly) in some uncertain future? Repealing REAL ID could be a costly mistake for political careers. So REAL ID survives.

These dynamics are what make REAL ID a walking-dead policy. If you’re a practical person looking for information on the REAL ID compliance deadline, you can walk right past the DMV, alive and free, because the threatened deadline will be moved back again before it arrives next year.

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