There are a large number of people stuck in semi-permanent limbo because their disjointed federal IDs don’t agree about some combination of birthday, spelling of name, etc. I have a friend who fills out their taxes with a birthday which is not their birthday because they can’t get the SSA change the date on file(they insist the state must be wrong and that the state should change). Getting a passport required months of effort and ultimately a lawyer because the federal and state documents disagree.

Having one master citizen record would allow us to have one place to make changes and one group to appeal to when fixing errors.

Also, to be super clear, all Americans already have at least one federal ID, it’s just a bad one. Let’s make it less bad.