The deadline to get Real IDs is fast approaching … but actually acquiring a Real ID in North Carolina is the opposite of fast. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, says we should be prepared for more government backlogs.
A few months ago I did a dumb thing wrapped up in a smart thing.
I needed to renew my driver’s license, and I knew appointments were hard to come by at the Charlotte DMV locations. I’d heard horror stories about walk-ins who waited in line so long they sprouted cobwebs. So I drove up to the DMV in Newton. It was an hour each way, but I figured that was better than standing in line all that time. And when I got there, I was in and out in five minutes.
That was the smart thing.
The dumb thing was, I forgot to get my Real ID.
If you don’t know what a Real ID is, well, you’re already in trouble. It’s the result of a federal law that Congress passed way back in 2005 in reaction to the 9/11 attacks. The idea was to have every state enhance their driver’s licenses with validated personal information to increase security at federal checkpoints that require ID.
The slow crawl from enactment to enforcement has taken 20 years. But the government has finally set a deadline of May 7 — less than two months from now. You have to take proof of your Social Security number and other forms of ID to the DMV to get a new license with a star in the upper right corner. If you don’t have that, after May 7, it will be a massive hassle to fly or enter certain federal facilities, like courthouses or military bases.
And the problem is, getting a timely appointment for a Real ID is dang near impossible.
On Friday morning I checked the DMV’s Skip the Line website, which shows appointments available at offices across the state. The earliest appointment I could find anywhere was June 3, which you might notice is nearly a month after the Real ID deadline.
So if you’ve got to have a Real ID, you can either keep refreshing the appointment page like a fan hoping for Taylor Swift tickets, or you can take a chance as a walk-in and hope you don’t die of old age waiting in line.
The bigger story here, I think, is how the state’s DMV offices have been chronically understaffed for years. Our legislatures and past governors have reduced or eliminated the DMV’s requests for more workers again and again. That lack of support has made getting the DMV’s basic services a nightmare, especially for people working multiple jobs or caring for large families – people who don’t have time to spend all day waiting in line.
Our well-being as citizens depends at least partly on our government agencies having enough people on hand to do what we pay them to do. Think about that as you see the stories day after day of Elon Musk and his team of DOGE staffers slashing thousands of jobs from federal agencies. Maybe it sounds like he’s saving money. But it’s more likely that he’s turning the federal government into the DMV.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
