Brownstone Institute
EU Digital Identity Wallet Pilots Roll Out Under the Radar

From the Brownstone Institute
BY
As 2023 continues, the European Commission appears busy developing and running pilots for its EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI), which it intends to make available to all EU citizens in the near future. But while the European Commission (EC) boasts the prospective EUDI’s convenience, security, and wide range of prospective use cases in daily life, what’s less discussed is the tool’s potential for a bevy of ethical and surveillance-related issues.
What is the EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI)?
The EU Digital Wallet, often referred to as the EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI), is slated to be offered to the European public in the years ahead. According to the European Commission, “EU Digital Identity Wallets are personal digital wallets allowing citizens to digitally identify themselves, store and manage identity data and official documents in electronic format. These may include a driving licence, medical prescriptions or education qualifications.”
As legislation streamlining their slated use across Europe is finalized, the European Commission is advancing its efforts to roll out EUDIs amongst the general European public, where over 250 private corporations and public authorities are participating in four large-scale pilot projects. At the time of writing, the EU has invested €46 million into these pilots.
Indeed, a wide range of use cases are already being tested in the EUDI pilot projects. These include using the wallets to access government services, register, and activate SIM cards for mobile network services, sign contracts, facilitate travel, and present educational credentials. All together, these use cases suggest the Digital Identity Wallets’ prospective utilization across a wide range of services essential to daily life.
Convenience, But for Whom?
The European Commission frequently plays up the digital wallet’s convenience, with messaging boasting that users will be able to use the Wallets to check into hotels, file tax returns, rent cars, and securely open bank accounts. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen highlighted the following in a 2020 State of the Union address, where she proposed the concept of a “secure European e-identity:”
Every time an App or website asks us to create a new digital identity or to easily log on via a big platform, we have no idea what happens to our data in reality. That is why the Commission will propose a secure European e-identity. One that we trust and that any citizen can use anywhere in Europe to do anything from paying your taxes to renting a bicycle. A technology where we can control ourselves what data is used and how.
Certainly, von der Leyen is correct that “we have no idea what happens to our data” when we create online accounts or log in to private services, positing that Digital ID can work to solve a core problem many people have when using the internet.
But critically, the European “e-identity,” and digital identification methods generally, pose a bevy of new issues for civilians in both the short and long term. Namely, while Digital ID can provide users access to services, a 2018 WEF report on Digital ID admits the tool’s propensity to exclude; “[f]or individuals, [verifiable IDs] open up (or close off) the digital world, with its jobs, political activities, education, financial services, healthcare and more.”
And indeed, within the control of a corrupted state or other governance structures, Digital ID’s propensity to “close off” the digital world appears ripe for misuse or abuse. Researcher Eve Hayes de Kalaf, for example, writes in the Conversation that “states can weaponise internationally sponsored ID systems” against vulnerable populations. She highlights an example from the Dominican Republic, where long-term discrimination against Haitian-descended persons manifested in the stripping of their Dominican nationality in 2013, rendering them stateless.
Meanwhile, it’s not difficult to imagine others falling through the digital “cracks” as Digital ID systems become mainstream and interconnected with, if not a prerequisite for, accessing critical social and financial services and supports.
As Jeremy Loffredo and Max Blumenthal elucidate in 2021 reporting for the Grayzone, for example, the 2017 introduction of Aadhaar, India’s biometric ID system, “which tracks users’ movements between cities,” led to a spate of deaths in rural India as difficulties accessing the Aadhaar system functionally blocked goods and benefits recipients from accessing the country’s ration stores, leaving them to even starve. India’s Scroll reported that, in a random sampling of 18 villages in India where biometric authentication had been mandated to access government-subsidized food rations, 37 percent of cardholders were unable to obtain their rations.
Despite the devastation it has caused, Aadhaar has ultimately been promoted as a success, and Rest of World reports that India’s setting up international partnerships to export its popular Unified Payments Interface (UPI), an instant payment system which uses the Aadhaar biometric ID system as its base, elsewhere.
Clearly, Digital ID poses significant possible societal harms if implemented hastily. Despite these possible harms, as I note for Unlimited Hangout, a near-universal adoption of Digital ID systems increasingly appears inevitable, with “Juniper Research [estimating] that governments will have issued about 5 billion digital ID credentials by 2024, and a 2019 Goode Intelligence report [suggesting] digital identity and verification will be a $15 billion market by 2024.”
Further, legislative strides have been made towards the digital wallet’s interoperability across the EU. In other words, key services are being hyper-centralized across borders and digitized in ways more traceable than paper counterparts could have been — all at the authorities’ fingertips.
Critically, the EUDI Wallet is apparently slated to connect with or otherwise include financial services, where EU citizens will be able to use their EUDI to open bank accounts and even apply for loans. Further, language from a European Central Bank policy brief on the European Digital Identity Framework suggests that the “EUDI wallet will bring benefits to all the stakeholders of the payment ecosystem” even including “foreseen support for the digital euro.”
While the European Commission’s keen to spotlight the EUDI’s alleged benefits for “the stakeholders of the payment ecosystem,” it appears less eager to discuss the dangers surrounding the plausible, if not likely, linkage of digital identity with money, and especially digital currencies, where elite capacities to track, or even manipulate or block civilians’ abilities to accept or make payments, could be unprecedented.
In short, EU Digital Identity Wallets are slated to be convenient for everyday civilian use. At the same time, these wallets, and other adjacent digital ID systems budding elsewhere, could also be convenient for governments and governance structures looking to surveil, monitor or otherwise manipulate or control critical aspects of citizens’ lives en masse.
The DIIA Connection
Despite its lack of EU member status and war on its hands to boot, Ukraine is involved in the EU Digital Wallet pilots. Namely, as I reported on my Substack, DIIA, Ukraine’s hyper-centralized state-in-a-smartphone app, is assisting the EU Digital Wallet’s rollout. In fact, Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov highlighted in a Telegram post from July that DIIA representatives had even showed off the DIIA app’s capabilities at the POTENTIAL (Pilots for European Digital Identity Wallet) Consortium this summer.
Notably, many of the EU Digital Wallet’s use cases being tested in the pilots are already reality with Ukraine’s DIIA app. Indeed, Ukrainians use DIIA for a range of day-to-day activities, including to verify their identities to use banking services, hold a variety of digital IDs (such as drivers’ licenses and biometric passports) and even pay certain taxes and access social services for families. Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation has emphasized its intention to make all public services available online: DIIA is to be the “one-stop-shop” for these services.
And, as I’ve mentioned before in previous reporting for my Substack and Unlimited Hangout, DIIA’s scope creep continues as conflict deepens, with the app providing war-adjacent services. Ukrainian civilians affected by war have received stipendsthrough the app, for example, and can also verify their identities through DIIA to sign into e-Vorog (“e-enemy”), a chatbot that allows Ukrainian citizens to report information about Russian military whereabouts to the state.
All together, these conditions suggest DIIA may serve as a kind of blueprint for or precursor to Europe’s adjacent Digital Wallet, where the EU Digital Wallet, already a centralized application slated to assist citizens in a number of critical day-to-day services, could take on a growing number of government services across the European Union. While it remains to be seen what happens with the Digital Wallet rollouts in Europe, the wallet’s EU-wide implementation and smartphone app format, where features can be easily introduced, removed, or edited at will, means that scope creep on a comparable scale cannot be ruled out.
Conclusion
Many people are understandably interested in digital documents and other easy ways to access public services and complete tasks in a digital age. But these services and tools, when facilitated by states and adjacent governance structures, and unaccountable members of the private sector, come with significant ethical and surveillance concerns that should be extensively discussed and debated by the public. In this respect, it appears the prospective EU Digital Identity Wallet is no exception.
But debate or not, Digital Wallet pilot rollouts and EU member states’ respective Digital ID adoption is ongoing, with an EC press statement explaining that “everyone will have a right to have an EU Digital Identity” accepted in all EU Member States.
And while the European Commission communicates “there will be no obligation” to use an EU Digital ID Wallet, EC report Communication 2030 Digital Compass: The European Way for the Digital Decade elucidates that a 2030 target for the EU is for 80 percent of citizens to use an “electronic identification solution.” Ultimately, the mixed messaging leaves room for speculation that, even if Digital IDs are not obligatory when introduced, the general population could somehow be nudged or eventually even mandated into adopting Digital IDs to access key public services.
While Digital ID proponents emphasize the tools’ capacity for convenience and security in an increasingly online world, the ethical and privacy issues I’ve highlighted here signal that, if rolled out hastily, the EU Digital Identity Wallets could ultimately have disastrous and lasting consequences for privacy and civil liberties. And, once implemented, it seems Digital IDs could be difficult to roll back even if unpopular, ultimately nudging people into a technocratic nightmare they cannot easily escape.
In short, the dangers posed by emerging Digital ID systems like the EUDI Wallet cannot be discounted as Europe grows into its “digital decade.”
Brownstone Institute
If the President in the White House can’t make changes, who’s in charge?

From the Brownstone Institute
By
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Brownstone Institute
Hysteria over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Promise to Make Vaccines Safer

From the Brownstone Institute
By
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterizations of things I have said that are simply not true. When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Within hours, my news feed was populated with angsty articles hand-wringing about the future of vaccines under Kennedy, whom legacy media and the establishment are certain would confiscate life-saving vaccine programs, raising the spectre of mass waves of illness and death.
In particular, this quote from Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the only Republican who voted against Kennedy’s confirmation, appeared over and over again:
“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”
Yet, I could not find one piece of mainstream coverage of this quote that mentioned the astonishing fact that 98% of polio cases in 2023, the most recent year for which we have full data, were caused by the polio vaccine.
You read that correctly. In 2023, 12 wild polio cases were recorded (six in Afghanistan, six in Pakistan), with a further 524 circulating vaccine-derived cases, mostly throughout Africa. This trend is in keeping with data from the previous several years.
An important contextualising detail, wouldn’t you think?

The cause of this polio resurgence is that the world’s poor are given the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains a weakened virus that can replicate in the gut and spread in feces, causing vaccine-derived outbreaks.
People in rich countries get the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which does not contain live virus and therefore does not carry the risk of spreading the very disease it’s vaccinating against.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine-promoting organisations say that the way out of the problem is to vaccinate harder, as the argument goes that outbreaks only occur in under-vaccinated communities.
This may be well and good, but the total omission of the fact from media coverage that the goalposts have shifted from eradicating wild polio (not yet complete but nearly there, according to the WHO) to eradicating vaccine-derived polio (the main problem these days) underscores that this is why hardly anyone who knows anything trusts the media anymore.
A member of my extended family has polio. It’s nasty and life-altering and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
That’s why I would hope that any vaccines given would be safe – contracting polio from the supposedly preventative vaccine is the worst-case scenario, second only to death.
This is Kennedy’s expressly stated aim.
“When people actually hear what I think about vaccines, which is common sense, which is vaccines should be tested, they should be safe, everyone should have informed consent,” he said at his confirmation press conference.
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterisations of things I have said that are simply not true.
“When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Grown-ups who support vaccines can walk and chew gum. From the point of view of the public health establishment, the polio vaccine has prevented millions of cases and has nearly eradicated the disease.
At the same time, the world’s poorest are afflicted with polio outbreaks which we can work to prevent, and the safety of all polio vaccine products on the market should be subject to the rigorous standards applied to all other medicines.
Unless you think that poor people don’t matter, in which case the status quo might suit you fine.
Republished from the author’s Substack
-
2025 Federal Election22 hours ago
WEF video shows Mark Carney pushing financial ‘revolution’ based on ‘net zero’ goals
-
Crime2 days ago
First Good Battlefield News From Trump’s Global War on Fentanyl
-
Automotive2 days ago
Electric cars just another poor climate policy
-
Energy2 days ago
Why are Western Canadian oil prices so strong?
-
2025 Federal Election1 day ago
‘Coordinated and Alarming’: Allegations of Chinese Voter Suppression in 2021 Race That Flipped Toronto Riding to Liberals and Paul Chiang
-
Break The Needle1 day ago
Why psychedelic therapy is stuck in the waiting room
-
2025 Federal Election1 day ago
Three cheers for Poilievre’s alcohol tax cut
-
2025 Federal Election1 day ago
MORE OF THE SAME: Mark Carney Admits He Will Not Repeal the Liberal’s Bill C-69 – The ‘No Pipelines’ Bill