California’s Chief Information Officer and Department of Technology (CDT) Director Liana Bailey-Crimmins is using the state’s emerging digital ID infrastructure as a rallying point for agencies and vendors, calling for broader participation in the California Identity Gateway as it moves from pilot to platform.
In a recent keynote at the TechCA Forum on Emerging Technologies and Government Modernization, Bailey-Crimmins framed digital identity as the key that reduces barriers for residents seeking services. She highlighted the California Digital Identity Gateway as a CDT-built platform that lets residents control what data they share, eliminates redundant checks, and replaces in-person verification with a single reusable digital identity. She pointed to current production use in Tap2Ride transit discount programs across counties including Sacramento, Monterey, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and Nevada, where eligibility is checked and discounts applied automatically.
Under the state’s published Digital ID strategy, the Identity Gateway is described as a central intermediary between residents, state agencies (such as DMV or State Parks) and identity or eligibility providers like Login.gov, Veterans Affairs, and CalFresh. It is built on OpenID Connect, supports single sign-on across integrated agencies, and is positioned as the state’s preferred service for identification and eligibility verification. As of mid-2025, the gateway can verify identity, age, veteran status, and CalFresh enrollment, with plans to add more financial attributes such as income and credit-related signals.
Bailey-Crimmins’s call to see more departments connect their systems to the Identity Gateway is explicitly tied to a broader Envision 2026 strategy to move California toward anticipatory, human-centered government. In the same remarks, she stressed that industry has a structural role to play by providing scalable identity proofing, privacy-enhancing technologies, credential issuance, and interoperability, while the state supplies the shared backbone and trust framework.
Those signals align with how CDT now describes the Digital ID program externally. Official materials depict the Identity Gateway as a federated identity and eligibility hub where CDT sets policies, certifies identity providers and manages contracts, while agencies connect their applications through standardized integration patterns. That model is intended to improve security, reduce duplicated identity stacks across departments and create a consistent login experience across state services. It also clarifies the playing field for vendors by replacing one-off RFPs with a shared gateway and common requirements, as observers in the state’s government IT community have noted.
New policy initiatives are beginning to depend on this infrastructure. Early documentation on California’s forthcoming DELETE Act implementation, including the state’s DROP system for managing bulk deletion requests to data brokers, describes residency verification flows that accept either federal Login.gov or the California Identity Gateway as proofing options. That effectively places the Gateway alongside federal infrastructure as a primary identity route for Californians engaging with emerging privacy rights tools.
California’s approach is a live example of a state-level trust framework that centralizes identity while preserving vendor diversity behind the scenes. It creates opportunities for identity proofing, biometric, and attribute-verification providers who can plug into the Gateway, but also concentrates risk in a single piece of middleware that could become critical infrastructure for benefits programs, transit, privacy enforcement, and more. Vendors aiming to participate will need to align with CDT’s privacy and data-minimization requirements, and agencies looking to onboard should expect the Identity Gateway to become the default channel for future digital ID use cases in the state.
Sources: California CDT (inclusive digital future), California CDT (Digital ID overview), California Digital ID Strategy, IAPP
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
