This misrepresents the reasons. Technically, the US Federal government has no authority to issue a mandatory unique ID. Furthermore, many States that don't even

This misrepresents the reasons. Technically, the US Federal government has no authority to issue a mandatory unique ID. Furthermore, many States that don't even pretend to pander to fringe Christians have rejected it on civil liberties grounds. Complicating this even further, a significant percentage of Americans have no documentation of their birth for a variety of historical reasons only partly related to the above, having a paper trail of their existence materializing out of thin air in adulthood e.g. Americans born in other countries. Another percentage of the population has no paper trail at all even if they were born in the US. All of this makes it very difficult bootstrap a mandatory national identity system, even if there was legal authority. Any scheme will generate several million false positives or false negatives with significant consequences for those affected. This reality has stopped/slowed the rollout of mandatory government identity systems even in more limited contexts. There are fewer undocumented or marginally documented Americans than there used to be but there are still millions of them, like my mother, and State governments make allowances for the existence of these people in their processes because they need to in order to do their jobs. This unavoidably creates loopholes that can be exploited because people legitimately need to be able to bootstrap valid identities in the absence of any documentation.