DOGE should support a federal digital ID to save $2 trillion

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have set a goal for the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to trim between $1 to $2 trillion from the federal budget. They also plan to leverage government technology modernization to increase government efficiency. 

There are many opportunities to trim waste from federal programs and address outdated IT projects. But one technology modernization project has the potential to save taxpayers hundreds of billions annually: establishing a secure federal digital ID to access government services. 

In November, FREOPP published  Improving Access to—and Integrity of—Federal Benefits Using Digital ID Technology. We explained how a federal digital ID could achieve the complementary goals of reducing fraud and waste in federal programs while making social welfare benefits more accessible to the Americans who need them. 

But DOGE should also consider the arguments of former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has become one of the leading global voices arguing for governments to establish digital IDs for why the Trump administration should implement one.  In a recent op-ed, Blair reasoned that establishing a national digital ID would be a “once-in-a-generation disruption”:

Imagine that all your health information was in one place: easy, with your permission, for anyone anywhere in the health service to see. That your passport, driving licence, anything you need to prove your identity, were in one simple digital wallet, unique to you. 

That you could purchase and pay for any goods or services using your Digital ID. Countries from Singapore to India to the UAE and Estonia are doing this now – with huge amounts of time and bureaucracy saved.

Blair estimated that three quarters of the 45 governments that the Tony Blair Institute works with are embracing some form of digital ID. Blair argues that the ID could solve several problems, including preventing noncitizens from accessing government benefits:

…[s]uppose that, before you accessed any part of the system of public services or welfare, you had to prove who you are and that you have the right to be in the country – and could do this swiftly and conveniently with a single app. It would allow us to track those without permission and incentivize people to not enter unlawfully or overstay, because they know they would be discovered….It would cut benefit fraud; make online fraud far harder; and it would yield for the government the reliable and accurate data needed to make informed policy decisions.

For the United States, establishing a federal digital ID to access certain government benefits would have the potential to virtually eliminate fraud in government benefit programs—which cost between $233 billion to $521 billion annually, according to GAO—and prevent most of the improper payments made by the federal government, roughly $831 billion over the past four years. Over four years of the Trump administration, the potential savings from preventing government fraud and ending misspending alone could reach between $1 and 2 trillion.

In other words, improving program integrity in government benefit programs by establishing a federal digital ID would have the potential to achieve much of the savings that Musk and Ramaswamy hoped to find for DOGE.