That's actually exactly the opposite of what I was talking about. The Real ID act was an act of congress which was then passed down and the states were told to

That's actually exactly the opposite of what I was talking about. The Real ID act was an act of congress which was then passed down and the states were told to eventually adopt it. That's not the type of solution I'm talking about. I'm talking about having an independent standards organisation (hell even NIST) produce a standard that supports federation and gradual onboarding by states and territories and then having the states each adopt it until it becomes a defacto national standard without any congressional involvement beyond the federal government also agreeing to accept it. Real ID is a mess because it's not an ID system. It's really just an ID card system with a few other bits attached to address specific federal government concerns. That's not meaningfully useful for providing unique (and preferably privacy preserving) identifiers for companies, banks, and other non-government entities like what many european countries have.