The point is that lots of people will pay this fee and it will equal a large amount of money and it does nothing of value. It’s just a fee for the fee’s sake. It serves no practical purpose, it’s just punitive. You still get to fly. There’s no safety element, there’s nothing the RealID enables that costs something without it, there is no clear reason here for this.
What is the actual legitimate purpose of this fee that millions will likely pay? Almost half the country flies annually and as of April 2025 20% of travelers didn’t have a RealID. So we’re talking millions of people, some of which will pay it multiple times, per year until full compliance. This is going to net a consequential amount of money and it doesn’t seem like it’s for any purpose other than to generate revenue.
It then goes on to explain that the TSA has reported 93% of traveler's complied with REAL ID, citing a TSA blog from a week prior which in fact states the same.
They then take this and couple it with a single day, which they state was the busiest travel day of the Memorial Day weekend, and extrapolate that 7% of the travelers that day must've failed to provide a REAL ID.
For the sake of conversation, this is a reasonable statement. Going back and using it to suggest 200k fly without it on a typical day is not reasonable, nor is your suggestion that a 6 months later it's still at 7% (or even typical travel volume hasn't changed.) There has to be better data available.
I was curious about this, so I looked up travel volume. YTD the daily average is 2,130,136 passengers. At 7%, this is 149,109.5 passengers or $2.449 B a year in fees. This ignores that you only pay the fee once very 10 days and assumes that all travelers pay the fee on every occurrence.