It has little to do with "monied interests". It is primarily the product of nigh insurmountable legal and political hurdles.
Having a mandatory Federal ID would require a Constitutional amendment, but since the States have refused to do it voluntarily it seems exceedingly unlikely that a super-majority of States would ratify an amendment that forces them to do it.
Yes I know if this happens it will become of those "technically not mandatory but in practice yes" things.
But that is a ridiculously weak argument, there are tons of ways the Federal Government can mandate the unified ID. For example, it can be tied to the Social Security number. The government can (quite reasonably) argue that it needs to positively identify people to be able to correctly track their SS contributions.
Why this hasn't been done yet? Probably because nobody cares about that. Real ID gets postponed time after time, exactly for the same reason.
Perhaps you could cite the main precedents and/or quote the US constitution?
Of course it's dumb that taxpayers will have to pay for 50 of these things through their state taxes instead of one of them through their federal taxes.
Then again, what's most likely to happen is that the states will outsource it to a private company like this one, and we're no better off.
... or a matter of finding the correct leverage. Drinking age 21, for example, got bullied through by threatening to cut highway budgets [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...
