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From a technical perspective, you could do an "ID lite" without biometric data. Give out "federal payroll tax numbers" (call it what you want) that come on a credit card sized NFC enabled card with private and public keys. Expand E-Verify and make it mandatory for every single form of income, and force employers to tap the NFC card to a phone when they sign up an employee. Force them to tap in freelancers. Have the system report nothing back but success or failure to enroll. Then soft-roll-out over a period of time (you'll have a few percent of citizens having trouble proofing their status, but you'll always have that) and slowly take SSN out back and shoot it. Make the cards easily revocable and replaceable when stolen or lost.
Then nail everybody not complying for tax evasion.
I have to ask if you are in gun rights spaces at all, because this is very reminiscent of a more moderate (but still pro-gun) suggestion on private sales: Give NICS access (i.e. the federal background check system for firearms purchases) to everyone, with it returning nothing but "yes" or "no", and then require it for all sales, including private. No official record needed (serial numbers, etc.), but at least allow law abiding citizens to sell guns at any time with peace of mind that they're not selling to a felon. And if they do, and they didn't use NICS, proponents argue legal action against the seller is a minimally intrusive and maximally effective way of curbing illegal sales.
Much in the same way, this is a way to verify workers in a minimally intrusive and maximally effective way. And just like NICS access (and voter ID), I doubt anyone with political weight is going to advocate for it.
Canada essentially did this by mistake with their licensing/registration scheme -- online private sales exploded, because you suddenly had a fairly transparent way of checking that somebody in (say) Newfoundland was who he said he was -- and some sort of recourse if he failed to ship your gun to the Yukon or whatever.
To this day this is an area in which Canada is a lot freer than the US for gun-buyers -- the lack of the whole FFL/interstate commerce thing helps of course, but even if that were repealed I'd think that Americans would find transacting with BamaBoy666 on reddit a bit fraught...
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