I read the federal government’s Zero-Trust Memo so you don’t have to

Here in Norway we have BankID which uses MFA. To access any government, banking, or official system you have to authenticate with your BankID.

Its simple amazing.

I'm America, about 30% of the population would start screaming about the Mark of the Beast if we tried to roll out something like this.

There is a large contingent of non-religious people who are against it on civil liberties grounds. The resistance to it truly crosses both parties, and it requires the cooperation of the States, which makes it politically non-viable as a practical matter.

The thing I don't get about the non-religious arguments is that we already have a national ID, it's just a patchwork system of unreliable, not-particularly-secure forms of identification that are a pain in the ass for a regular citizen to have to deal with. And the REAL ID stuff essentially makes state IDs conform to a national ID specification anyway.

And regardless, if you do want a national US ID, you just get a passport, and it'll be accepted as a form of ID everywhere a state-issued driver's license or state ID is accepted. Of course, in this case it's technically voluntary, and many Americans don't travel internationally and don't bother to get a passport.

Many State governments do not recognize a US passport as valid ID. This was unexpected when I first encountered an example of it, but apparently that is normal and I was just the last person to find out. The REAL ID legislation only regulates processing and format, there is no enforceable requirement to share that with the Federal government and many States (both red and blue) do not in practice. States recognize the ID of other States, as is required by the Constitution.

Because there is no official national ID system, you can do virtually everything Federally with a stack of affidavits and pretty thin "evidence" that you are who you claim to be. They strongly prefer that you have something resembling ID but it isn't strictly required. This also creates a national ID bootstrapping problem insofar as millions of Americans don't have proof that they are Americans because there was never a requirement of having documentary evidence. As a consequence, government processes are forgiving of people that have no "real" identification documents because so many people have fallen through the cracks historically.

Of course, this has been widely abused historically, so the US government has relatively sophisticated methods for "duck typing" identities by inference these days.