The Real ID Deadline Will Never Arrive
If you fly regularly, you’ve probably seen signs saying that the Real ID Act will soon go into full effect. When that happens, all domestic travelers using a driver’s license at TSA checkpoints will have to show a federally compliant one—or be turned away. On May 7, exactly a year ahead of the latest purported enforcement date, a USA Today story bore the headline “The 2025 Real ID Deadline for New Licenses Is Really Real This Time, DHS Says.” Maybe the Department of Homeland Security needs to pinkie-swear to make the 2025 date really, really real, because those airport signs and travel stories have been telling us about a final deadline for more than 15 years. And yet, that deadline has never arrived. If past extensions are any indication, it probably never will.
The 2005 Real ID law created a national system for sharing driver information, set more onerous documentation standards for driver’s licenses than states had previously used, and added security rules that pushed states to mail licenses to applicants rather than issuing them on the spot. During the years of collective panic that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, lawmakers and executive-branch agencies pushed through a raft of measures—common-sense ones, such as fortified cockpit doors, but also more controversial ones, such as expanded data surveillance and airport body-scanning machines. To this day, recorded airport announcements still warn passengers about “heightened security measures” that have been in place for more than a decade and might well remain heightened in perpetuity.
