DMV wants to upload California drivers license data to the national REAL-ID database
The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has requested more than $55 million in additional funding for costs related to uploading information about every California drivers license or state-issued ID card to the national REAL-ID database, SPEXS.
The DMV Budget Change Proposal is accompanied by a “policy” bill, AB-2156, introduced in February on an “urgency” basis to take effect as soon as enacted, that would override the provisions of California motor vehicle and privacy law that currently prohibit this upload.
Both the budget and policy proposals have the support of the DMV and Governor Newsom. It will be up to members of the state legislature — and public pressure — to stop them before they are enacted into state law and have to be challenged in court.
These budget and policy proposals will need to go through both the Assembly and Senate Budget and Transportation committees. The first hearing on the budget proposal is expected to be this Thursday, March 19th, in the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee. The first hearing on the policy bill is tentatively expected to be April 15th in the Assembly Committee on Transportation.
The DMV is asking for $32M in fiscal year 2026-2027 and $23M in 2027-2028 for what it describes as a “State-to-State Verification System (S2S) Project”:
The Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) requests additional funding and personnel resources to continue DMV’s compliance with the REAL ID Act of 2005 by implementing the State to State (S2S) Program. California’s compliance date for State to State (S2S) is February 16, 2027, and the core DMV systems will interface and connect the driver license (DL)/identification card (ID) S2S data elements with the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) electronic verification and history exchange.
This summary is in parts inaccurate, in parts misleading, and in parts incomplete.
Inaccurate, because California is not in compliance with the REAL-ID Act and, as the proposal is written, this project would not bring the state into compliance.
Misleading, because it doesn’t mention the SPEXS national ID database that is central to this system; characterizes as a “state-to-state” system what is actually a hub-and-spoke network in which data is shared between states and AAMVA, not directly between states; and downplays the role of AAMVA from the owner and controller of the database to the mere operator of an “exchange”.
Incomplete, because it doesn’t explain that the “compliance date” it refers to was set by AAMVA (and could be changed or eliminated by AAMVA), not by any law; says nothing about the status of AAMVA as a private, non-governmental, out-of-state organization not subject to any of the open meetings, public records, due process, privacy, etc. laws that would apply to a Federal or state government agency; and doesn’t consider whether the proposals violate the state constitution.
The policy bill, AB-2156, has similar defects in addition to internal contradictions. These suggest that the drafters of the legislation didn’t fully understand what it would mean, why it’s so much worse than it appears, or that they have a real choice about whether to keep chasing the moving goalposts of Federal demands for REAL-ID “compliance”.