Disclaimer: I interviewed with the USDS team that was embedded in IRS circa 2015-2016 to solve identity pre-ID.me, thoughts and opinions are my own.

I have tried to get info out of IRS on the topic using FOIA requests, but they have not been forthcoming. I think there is heartburn over the whole ID.me situation (which they rushed into due to return fraud that occurred due to lacking knowledge based proofing systems, and got blindsided by the PR fallout of suboptimal machine vision/facial recognition tech and overzealous marketing).

The article states Charles Rettig, who was then IRS commissioner, argued that login.gov can’t meet their request rate requirements, and yet it serves over 220 agency websites and is the primary identity provider for the Social Security Administration website since September 2021. I would be very interested in the technical challenges being more publicly available versus hand waving by the bureaucracy.

https://secure.ssa.gov/RIL/SiView.action

There was recent funding to have the USPS perform in person identity proofing; login.gov appears to be leveraging this. They are also working to offer login.gov to state unemployment systems concurrently (a colleague is on this team).

https://fcw.com/digital-government/2022/05/postal-service-sh...

https://fcw.com/digital-government/2022/10/labor-department-...

https://www.login.gov/help/verify-your-identity/verify-your-...

https://tcf.org/content/commentary/biden-budget-would-signif...

https://www.gao.gov/assets/730/720919.pdf

> In addition to the forthcoming work with the jobless aid system, USPS is also working with GSA's Login.gov, a shared sign-on and identity proofing service.

> “The Postal Service’s unmatched retail footprint offers a unique opportunity for government agencies, such as the General Services Administration that need to complete an in-person proofing. We are actively working with government agencies to do this today,” a USPS spokesperson told FCW.

> In-person identity proofing is offered for Login.gov at seven USPS locations in Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia, according to the Login.gov website. Individuals start the process online and then bring state-issued identification and proof of address to be reviewed in-person to match the digital application with the real person behind it.

My note/opinion: stronger requirements are necessary to enable login.gov to deliver whatever gap private identity providers (id.me) are offering and require federal agencies to use login.gov

I would be interested in reading the FOIA responses. Maybe you can redact your mail address and post on some doc share site. Crowd-sourced open government helps others, also.

I will try to find a way to publish them without connecting them to this handle. I think, like ChatGPT, I’m simply not crafting the correct prompt to obtain the artifacts I’m seeking.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/sep/06/foia-faq-...

Perhaps you could ask ChatGPT to craft the ideal FOIA request to obtain the datum you seek.

PLEASE also just make this happen when I next have to go in to renew my State Drivers License/ID AND/OR my passport (years from now).

Then login.gov can support the addition of known crypto IDs as alternate signatures and a review that can also happen at any of the interaction points (some USPS branches, DoL/DMV, Homeland Security offices for enhanced passport ID stuff).

I would need to be convinced Id.me is not wholesale fraud. If it can’t look at a passport picture and look at me, (which is the entire thing it’s supposed to do) then there is just nothing there. I think it’s Theranos level. Maybe sometimes they farm out the facial recognition to another company, maybe sometimes they just make it up, but usually just go to a real person who does the check manually.

Please not the post office. Small town post offices are so vindictive with no oversite giving them this power would be horrific. My house has not received mail for years now because my mother had cancer and could not get her mail timely enough for them. The turned her mailbox off and made her open a PO box if she wanted mail. When I later moved to the home I inherited I was not and have not been able to restore service, and the USPS just redirects me to the local post office :(

You may have already done this but if not: USPS is pretty close to being a federal agency. It is funded by Congress. Call your congressman's office in your town/county and ask for help with a federal agency. It works wonders for all sorts of issues, and this sort of pettiness will likely get sorted out.

Creating a login system for government is one of the hardest problems in service design.

The UK digital government team have written about this at length, eg https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2021/10/19/single-sign-on-what-we-le...