Ah, but there are third-party services that provide identity verification, such as id.me. And now that there are for-profit entities involved in a government service, you will never be able to convince the government to implement their own solution. It's telling that id.me is headquartered in McLean, Virginia; gotta be in the DC metro area so your lobbyists have easy access to Congress.
It's also not a government web site. It's a private company who, for some reason, my own government outsources identity verification to. Meanwhile, the authorization system the US government has built (login.gov) is deemed "insecure" by the IRS and Social Security for some inexplicable reason. (But it's fine for Trusted Traveler Programs.)
It's the company providing the service that the government could provide on its own, but that service is being provided by a private company through a lucrative contract agreement.
You're aware that there's a registry per country, no? And that that each country can choose to set aside a subdomain for all government services?
Yes, it's unfair that the US gets naked .gov - but that doesn't preclude the rest of the world from doing the right thing, and it certainly doesn't excuse the US government doing the stupid thing.
I'm saying we need the digital equivalent of "show me your driver's license".