The US government loves outsourcing technical problems and hates developing that stuff in-house. Even for things we'd assume, naively, to be a core competency like "identifying a citizen."
It's how we ended up in a world where some 70% of all retail transaction is now fundamentally brokered via private institutions using not-real-money (in the sense that credit on a credit card is "numbers the private institution tracks themselves" until the cash clears, and most cards have a loyalty discount program that sums up to the dollars spent on the credit card having different value than bare cash), in spite of the fact that control of and guarantees for the monetary system are something a government should have as a core competency. So on 70% of transactions, Americans get nickel-end-dimed by private institutions for basic commerce (on top of government taxes; the private tax atop the public tax).
It's how we ended up in a world where some 70% of all retail transaction is now fundamentally brokered via private institutions using not-real-money (in the sense that credit on a credit card is "numbers the private institution tracks themselves" until the cash clears, and most cards have a loyalty discount program that sums up to the dollars spent on the credit card having different value than bare cash), in spite of the fact that control of and guarantees for the monetary system are something a government should have as a core competency. So on 70% of transactions, Americans get nickel-end-dimed by private institutions for basic commerce (on top of government taxes; the private tax atop the public tax).