Identity, and the shared services it unlocks, is the domain where genuine national standardization is both achievable and transformative, and it is infrastructure only the federal government can build. The recommendation has four parts.
First, a standard identification and authentication mechanism for every person who engages with government services: one identifier per person, issued through a shared national identity service, with authentication that validates with high confidence that the person is who they say they are before passing the validated identity to the consuming program. Login.gov is an existing foundation that could serve this role or be extended to it. The identifier should be purpose-built and privacy-preserving, carrying no meaning to the consuming system beyond identity itself, with all authorization decisions about what a person can access remaining entirely at the state level. This is not an expansion of surveillance; it is the replacement of today’s de facto national identifier, the Social Security number, which was never designed for authentication and fails at it in ways that fuel identity theft and improper payments across every program.
Second, once the identifier exists, require it on every person-specific government transaction. This single standard does more for program integrity, cross-program coordination, and data quality than any combination of transaction format standards, because it resolves the question every matching algorithm exists to approximate: whether two records describe the same person. Every state currently maintains its own fragile, expensive person-matching infrastructure; a validated shared identifier makes most of that infrastructure unnecessary.
Third, build shared data services on that foundation, starting from a simple principle: wherever federal requirements oblige states to collect or verify information about a person, the federal government should collect that information, maintain it, and provide a simple, secure service for retrieving it. One service, supporting any use of the data by any state, easy to use and just as easy to test against.
Take income and wage verification as one example of many. Today, states buy wage data from private services at enormous recurring cost, maintain consortiums and separate interfaces to fill the gaps, and still struggle to assemble complete financial information for a person seeking benefits. A single federal wage and income service, returning exactly the information state benefit programs need through one call, could replace all of it. No mandate to use it would be required, if it actually worked better.
This recommendation compounds with S11, because the deepest simplification may require changing the policy itself rather than servicing it. What if the federal government explored some form of need score: an assessment drawing on income, assets, spending, and savings from the financial institutions associated with a person, retrievable by any verified state agency as a score alone, with no sensitive detail disclosed? Determining financial eligibility today means fifty states separately reconstructing a person's finances from fragments. A universal, privacy-preserving measure of financial need, tested openly and appealable by the people it scores, is exactly the kind of policy experiment a Horizon 3 pathway exists to run. Where the requirement is federal, the service should be too, and where the service reveals the policy is the problem, the policy should be on the table.
Forth, a single entry point for government services: one front door through which any person can reach federal services and their state’s services, built as a federated framework in which each state controls the content and links of its own published areas. Central management handles the shared infrastructure (identity, navigation, accessibility, security) without becoming a bottleneck, while every participating government retains full flexibility over its own space. The United Kingdom’s GOV.UK demonstrated over a decade ago that a single front door with federated publishing works at national scale. The division of labor across all four parts respects the federal-state partnership precisely: the federal government solves the infrastructure problems that should never be solved fifty separate times, and states retain full control of the policy and authorization decisions that embody their choices.