login.gov is the government's (quite fantastic) auth flow - id.me is a private one that the IRS contracted. I wish there were a rule that all online government services needed to use login.gov, but alas it's optional.

They’re supposedly working on it [1] but I don’t have any sense of whether they’re likely to succeed. In particular, the IRS is beginning to onboard to login.gov and the goal is to be fully migrated away from ID.me at some point.

[1] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2022/02/irs-...

The US government loves outsourcing technical problems and hates developing that stuff in-house. Even for things we'd assume, naively, to be a core competency like "identifying a citizen."

It's how we ended up in a world where some 70% of all retail transaction is now fundamentally brokered via private institutions using not-real-money (in the sense that credit on a credit card is "numbers the private institution tracks themselves" until the cash clears, and most cards have a loyalty discount program that sums up to the dollars spent on the credit card having different value than bare cash), in spite of the fact that control of and guarantees for the monetary system are something a government should have as a core competency. So on 70% of transactions, Americans get nickel-end-dimed by private institutions for basic commerce (on top of government taxes; the private tax atop the public tax).

No congressperson ever got rich from the government doing things in-house.

Fix that aspect and the situation will improve significantly.

Arguably, they did in the past - and the current situation is an immune (over)reaction to that. Outsourcing is easier than figuring out how to get something done while navigating around all the regulations and CYA measures, so that things look fair to the people (otherwise they'll make a ruckus), and/or can't be easily portrayed as unfair by your political enemies (who will try to trick the people into making a ruckus).

>The US government loves outsourcing technical problems and hates developing that stuff in-house.

No, no they don't. They would love to build in-house, but are constrained in what salary ranges they can offer.

The other challenge US government faces is that they continuously get their chain yanked by congress. I've read many stories of (corporate) management incompetence over the years, but they mostly pale in relation to the ability of congress to completely change priorities and goals every 6-12 months.

Even the most disfunctional corporation has some kind of force/attraction towards having a product line with an outward semblance of consistency and cohesion.

it's quite cyberpunk, in a dystopian sense, I don't think most people realize. it can of course be framed as benign and I'm sure there are protective policies in place. but you know, if you take a sweeping look from a distance, the fact that the login system for government website, which every single citizen might at any point be forced to interact with, has a profile option (enabled by default) to "receive emails featuring ID.me offers and discounts" seems quite insane to me.