The Genius of Kennedy’s Passport Plan

By Liam Sturgess, The Kennedy Beacon

On August 26, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced what may be his most enlightened policy proposal yet: free federal passport cards to every American citizen who wants one.

As he explains in a detailed 6-minute video, this simple, innovative and common sense solution to waive government fees for passport cards simultaneously addresses two primary concerns held by opposite sides of the political divide, related to voter access and election integrity, while also offering a solution to streamline legal entry through America’s land borders.

Kennedy’s plan is based on a proposal championed for years by civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King III, Andrew Young, Bill Bradley, and Jack Kemp. It has received bipartisan endorsements from Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and the controversial former FOX News host, Bill O’Reilly, among others. 

In a 2017 opinion piece highlighting the proposal for the Donald Trump administration, King wrote that a president can: 

“...direct the State Department to waive the $55 passport card fee for low-income Americans. Passport cards with photos are readily available at more than 9,000 post offices, even if a person doesn't have any other form of photo ID. [This] approach is within the president's authority and would impose minimal costs to secure the most fundamental right for all Americans — a right that most people consider priceless.”

Passport cards are similar to the more familiar passport books, with some key differences. According to the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, the cards have been in use since 2008 in order to expedite land and sea travel between the United States and its neighbors to the North and South (Canada and Mexico), along with Bermuda and Caribbean countries. While they aren’t valid for international air travel, they are easier to acquire and use for the many Americans who don’t find themselves traveling abroad. And after fees, their current price tag sits at $65—less than half of the $165 a passport book costs.

However, even that price is too much for many Americans who are struggling to put food on the table. A report published by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in August 2021 noted that “[o]verly burdensome photo ID laws” primarily affect voters who are “disproportionately low-income, racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and people with disabilities.”

Kennedy’s plan to make free passport cards available for every American citizen not only helps people financially. It also enables them to vote — and removes barriers to opening bank accounts, boarding planes and checking into hotels, all of which require government-issued photo IDs.

As King points out, with the authority granted by Executive Order, passport cards can be issued at no cost at any of the 31,566 United States Postal Service (USPS) locations across the United States and its territories. As Kennedy says in his video address, “almost every American has a post office within easy driving or walking distance of their homes.” 

Kennedy notes that there are private and corporate interests working hard to introduce “a new form of universal or mandatory identification,” many of which hide behind real issues like the right to vote and access to banking services to sway the public and lawmakers alike. “In fact,” Kennedy continues, “this proposal removes the incentives and nullifies the arguments of those people who’ve been urging universal mandatory I.D.s or vaccine passports.”

In fact, the corporate world and governments have been moving forward on a variety of fronts to introduce global identification systems that harvest personal data while curtailing freedoms.

In 2015, the United Nations published its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, outlining 17 goals to be achieved by countries around the world by the year 2030. Number 16.9 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) calls on nations to “provide legal identity for all,” to which governments and big tech companies have gleefully responded with proposals for the mass introduction of digital ID platforms. Many such proposals involve the integration of biometric data into IDs, granting institutions unprecedented access to your medical history, genetics, and other sensitive information.

A good case study is Mastercard, which has been running pilot projects for various forms of such ID systems for years. The company distributed a mandatory national ID card in Nigeria in 2014, without which citizens could note vote in future elections. It was designed to collect and store the biometric data of its user, linking up with finances, tax, health insurance and driver’s licenses. Mastercard introduced a similar system in Mauritania in 2017 with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the World Health Organization, dubbed the “Wellness Pass.” Pitched as a way to increase vaccination uptake among African children, its ultimate function was to serve as a biometric ID to capture and store medical information from birth to grave. An “upgraded version” of the Wellness Pass was announced in June 2020 which allowed for “identification, enrolment, and tracking of COVID-19 cases and COVID-19 vaccinees.” 

Mastercard is currently promoting its Mastercard Community Pass, a digital ID product “connected into a broader ecosystem where individuals can be recognized as the same person” when engaging with finance, agriculture, education, housing and healthcare.

But Mastercard is far from the only organization working to address what they see as the “identity gap.” The World Bank Group hosts the Identification for Development (ID4D) Initiative, “promoting digital identification systems to improve development outcomes while maintaining trust and privacy.” ID4D’s partners include the European Commission, various United Nations agencies, and the World Economic Forum, and is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. These same players are found in the ID2020 Alliance, forming a public-private partnership with corporations like Microsoft, Accenture, BlackRock, Cisco, Deloitte, Facebook, Google, IBM, Infosys, JPMorgan Chase, Nasdaq and Mastercard. ID2020’s major non-profit supporter, the Rockefeller Foundation, is also a founding partner of The Commons Project. 

Through its CommonTrust Network, the Commons Project collaborates with the World Economic Forum and the Vaccination Credential Initiative to unify various digital ID and “vaccine passport” platforms into a common framework. We’ve already lived through one phase of this project; vaccine passports around the world were designed and implemented around the world based on a unified “SMART Health Card” system, intended to maximize the ability to “compel and enable patient data access” across borders by government and corporate entities. Included in this system are New York’s Excelsior Pass, Canada’s ArriveCAN, and virtually every other type of “proof of vaccination” issued across the United States. Finally, the World Health Organization and the European Union recently announced their intention to scale up the EU Digital COVID Certificate to encompass the entire planet – this, despite the WHO having declared the COVID-19 pandemic to have ended one month prior.

While proof of vaccination has been a prominent use case for the implementation of such digital ID systems, economic struggles and the apparently forthcoming rollout of central bank digital currencies have also served as a roundabout way to onboard Americans to this emerging infrastructure. There is perhaps no better example than Worldcoin, a digital universal basic income project that requires users to scan their iris to generate their “World ID” and associated World Wallet.

Beyond storing biometric data and serving as a cryptocurrency wallet, the ChatGPT-associated World ID is “a digital passport” intended to replace the use of usernames and passwords, becoming a prerequisite to access online services, and (despite its assurances) threatens to remove the possibility of online anonymity. In other words, its goal is to serve as a driver's license for the internet –– a very real idea that was first discussed by the federal government during the Obama administration. Worldcoin has promoted its World ID as a solution for the same voter identification problems that Kennedy is seeking to fix.

Unlike such myriad proposals, which arguably would chip away at the privacy of citizens around the world, Kennedy's solution aims at benefiting the most vulnerable. Through a simple Executive Order, the President of the United States can enable constitutionally qualified Americans to vote, especially those marginalized due to their economic circumstances, while ensuring the integrity of the electoral system.

Kennedy ends his video announcement calling on Americans to ask President Biden to issue the Executive Order prior to the 2024 election. But regardless of how Biden responds, Kennedy makes clear that passport cards will be available to all, within a week of his inauguration, should he win the White House in November 2024.