Had you asked anyone knowledgeable in the area a year ago, they would have told you that Congress was going to make “E‑Verify,” the federal government’s immigration background check system, mandatory for all employers by the end of 2008.

Well, a headline in National Journal’s Congress Daily yesterday tells quite a different story (paylink): “Reauthorization Of E‑Verify Immigration Program In Doubt.”

“House lawmakers and aides are locked in an impasse over legislation that would renew a program employers can use to verify the legal status of their workers,” the story says, “mainly over language that some worry might ultimately kill this means of enforcing immigration laws.”

E‑Verify has gone from “greased” to “on-the-chopping-block” in just one short year.

Irony of ironies, it’s the bureaucracy that may kill it. The main holdup is a dispute over how the system would be paid for. The Department of Homeland Security has apparently been sticking the Social Security Administration with the bill for operating the system, and Social Security hasn’t got any spare funds.

This brings together threads from a couple recent posts of mine on E‑Verify. I wrote in April about the inability of the Social Security Administration to provide the services it is currently called on to perform. New responsibilities placed on SSA wouldn’t just magically get done.

From a representative of a Social Security workers’ union, I had learned the following about what people could expect when they went to straighten out their E‑Verify paperwork with SSA:

What would the process be like? Well, try calling your local SSA field office to find out. The SSA worker rep reported that 50% of those calls aren’t answered because field offices are too busy. Calls to the SSA’s national 800-number don’t go through 25% of the time. It’s not just a phone problem. The agency currently has a backlog of 752,000 on disability rulings. That’s three quarters of a million people who aren’t getting an answer from SSA. It takes 530 days – a little under a year and a half – to get a disability ruling out of SSA.

And I speculated the other day that Stewart Baker’s recent rant against the Society for Human Resource Management might be motivated by bureaucratic jealousy. Now we see that there’s plenty of it to go around. E‑Verify isn’t important enough to get federal agencies to play well together.

In truth, I don’t think E‑Verify will go under because of this dust-up, but I don’t think it’s going to be the mandatory, nationwide program so many thought either. (I described many ills of such a policy in my paper, “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”)

There are lessons here for Republicans (and some conservatives) who dreamed that they would solve illegal immigration with a big, national, background-checking enforcement system: Bureaucrats own the bureaucracy. You do what they let you do; they do not do what you think they should do. You can’t turn big government to your ends. It only works for its own ends.