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Tougher License Rules To Be Phased In Over 6 Years
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Published: January 11, 2008
WASHINGTON - Americans born after Dec. 1, 1964, will have to get more secure driver's licenses in the next six years under ambitious post-Sept. 11 security rules to be unveiled today by federal officials.
The Department of Homeland Security has spent years crafting the final regulations for the REAL ID Act, a law designed to make it harder for terrorists, illegal immigrants and con artists to get government-issued identification.
The effort once envisioned to take effect in 2008 has been pushed back in the hopes of winning over skeptical state officials.
Even with more time, more federal help and technical advances, REAL ID still faces stiff opposition from civil liberties groups.
To address some of those concerns, the government now plans to phase in a secure ID initiative that Congress passed into law in 2005.
Now, Homeland Security plans a key deadline in 2011, and then further measures to be enacted three years later, according to congressional staff members who spoke on condition of anonymity because an announcement had not yet been made. Agency officials briefed legislative aides on the details late Thursday.
Without discussing specifics, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff promoted the final rules for REAL ID during a meeting Thursday with an advisory council.
"We worked very closely with the states in terms of developing a plan that I think will be inexpensive, reasonable to implement and produce the results," he said. "This is a win-win. As long as people use driver's licenses to identify themselves for whatever reason, there's no reason for those licenses to be easily counterfeited or tampered with."
In order to make the plan more appealing to cost-conscious states, federal authorities drastically reduced the expected cost from $14.6 billion to $3.9 billion, a 73 percent decline, according to Homeland Security officials familiar with the plan.
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