California’s Chief Information Officer and Department of Technology (CDT) Director Liana Bailey-Crimmins is using the state’s Digital Identity Gateway to rally agencies and vendors around a shared approach to online identification. As the gateway moves from pilot to platform, she is encouraging more departments to build on the service so residents can use a single digital identity to reach a growing set of state programs.
Speaking at the TechCA Forum on Emerging Technologies and Government Modernization, Bailey-Crimmins described digital identity as the key that lowers friction for people trying to access government services. She highlighted the California Digital Identity Gateway as a CDT-run platform that lets residents choose what data they share, reduces duplicative checks and replaces in-person verification with reusable credentials. Current production deployments include Tap2Ride transit discount programs across counties such as Sacramento, Monterey, Ventura, Santa Barbara and Nevada, where eligibility is verified and fare discounts are applied automatically.
Under the state’s published Digital ID strategy, the Identity Gateway sits between residents, state agencies like the DMV and State Parks, and identity or eligibility providers such as Login.gov, Veterans Affairs and CalFresh. Built on OpenID Connect, it supports single sign-on across integrated applications and is described as the preferred way for agencies to handle identification and eligibility checks. As of mid-2025, the gateway can verify identity, age, veteran status and CalFresh enrollment, with plans to add more financial and credit-related attributes over time.
Bailey-Crimmins links the gateway effort to a broader Envision 2026 agenda aimed at making California’s government more anticipatory and human-centered. In her remarks, she emphasized that industry has a structural role to play by delivering scalable identity proofing, privacy-preserving technologies, credential issuance and interoperability, while CDT provides the shared backbone and trust framework. That positioning signals to vendors that the gateway, rather than bespoke integrations at individual agencies, will increasingly be the main route into state digital ID workloads.
Official materials now present the Digital ID program as a federated identity and eligibility hub: CDT sets policy, certifies identity providers and manages contracts, while agencies plug their applications into the gateway using standard patterns. The design is meant to strengthen security, cut down on duplicative identity stacks and give residents a more consistent login experience across state services. It also reshapes the procurement landscape by replacing one-off RFPs with a shared integration point and common requirements.
New privacy initiatives are beginning to rely on the same infrastructure. Early documentation for California’s implementation of the DELETE Act, including the DROP system for handling 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 route for Californians asserting new data rights online.
California’s model offers a real-time example of a state-level trust framework that centralizes identity while keeping multiple vendors in play behind the scenes. It opens the door for identity proofing, biometric and attribute-verification providers that can integrate with the gateway, but it also concentrates risk in a piece of middleware that could become critical infrastructure for benefits, transit, privacy enforcement and more. Vendors looking to participate will have to align with CDT’s privacy and data-minimization expectations, and agencies that adopt the gateway can expect it to become the default path for future digital ID use cases in the state.
Sources: California CDT (inclusive digital future), California CDT (Digital ID overview), California Digital ID Strategy (strategy homepage), California Digital ID Strategy (primary elements), IAPP
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
