Despite political and technical hurdles, Congress is warming up to the idea of digital identity technologies, Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill., said on March 5 as he shared his long-held vision for the future of identity verification.
Lawmakers have historically opposed digital IDs, misconstruing the concept with a national ID system – a government-issued identification system that assigns a unique identifier to each citizen – which has resulted in pushback from Democrats and Republicans, Rep. Foster said while speaking at Okta’s Gov Identity Summit 2025.
“I have been, with increasing success, convincing members of Congress that you actually cannot solve privacy until you solve digital identity,” said Rep. Foster.
Democrats are now seeing the merits of secure digital IDs to protect privacy and prevent identity theft instead of relying on technology giants to control authentication, the congressman said. Republicans view it as a verification method for a national voter database to verify who is legally allowed to vote, he added.
Government-issued digital IDs have support from industry too, Rep. Foster said, noting that companies would rather build services on top of government IDs rather than managing identity verification themselves.
“The key government role is to issue that credential, and I think also probably to specify – from a hardware point of view and a software point of view – what’s necessary [and] what’s good enough to present a digital driver’s license,” said Rep. Foster.
The concept of digital identity verification isn’t a new one, but it’s been recently receiving more attention from Congress.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly $191 billion in unemployment insurance (UI) funds provided by Congress were siphoned off via fraudulent claims paid out through state UI agencies to hackers and fraudsters. Only a fraction of those funds have so far been recovered.
“There’s well-documented tens – probably hundreds of billions of dollars – of fraud against theft, against the Federal taxpayer, and a huge number of man hours lost just making sure that everyone who presents themselves to the government is actually not a fraudster,” said Rep. Foster.
He called on the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to prioritize improved identity verification. “If you’re looking for waste, fraud and abuse, this should be the very top of your list,” the congressman said.
Some of the moves that Congress has made toward digital identity verification have included legislation that would require Federal agencies to digitally verify the identity of citizens looking to claim benefits or services provided by the agency – legislation that has so far attracted the most bipartisan support yet, Rep. Foster said.
More recent legislative priorities include evaluating a regulatory sandbox for digital identity within the banking and financial technology (fintech) industries.
The sandbox, which Democrats and Republicans are currently working together to evaluate, according to Rep. Foster, has strong interest from banks and fintech startups as digital IDs could significantly reduce Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance costs.
“[If] you want to onboard a customer they would have to present a real ID compliant digital driver’s license, and then you would go and check that with some API that the FinCEN [Financial Crimes Enforcement Network] would set up to say is this person you know on the known list of bad actors,” explained Rep. Foster. “And if it comes back clear, you would have a legal safe harbor for onboarding that customer.”
Beyond financial security and fraud prevention, digital identity is also emerging as a critical tool in combating artificial intelligence-driven impersonation and misinformation, Rep. Foster added. As AI becomes more embedded in daily life, the need for verifiable digital identity will only grow to prevent deepfake-driven fraud and identity theft, he explained.
“When people hear about deep fakes, the first reaction is, ‘let’s come up with some magic software that will determine the difference between deep fakes’ and you know that’s not going to happen,” said Rep. Foster. “The next best thing you can do is to be able to have people prove who they say they are, and not some AI deep fake of themselves.”
