Today, the Department of Homeland Security issued final regulations implementing the REAL ID Act, our moribund national ID law that several states have already refused to implement.

The regulations, in two parts, can be found here and here.

I will have more to say after studying them, but the House Committee on Homeland Security’s chairman has already registered his preliminary objections. Cost issues, the difficulty of implementing this national ID, and privacy issues concern Chairman Thompson, who notes that DHS has spent close to $300 million on programs that have been discontinued because of failure to adhere to privacy laws and regulations.

REAL ID is, of course, a wasteful affront to privacy whether or not DHS follows all the rules. The department is not in a position to correct the errors in this fundamentally misguided policy.