It's not even a bad plan if you care to look at it from their perspective.
Yes, this post is somewhat trollish, but humour me and just for a few moments forget just about everything you know about computers, computing, networking, and the internet.
Humour me. They're senior civil servants and really really like the status quo, and now there's this digital thing and they're on the short end of the divide and oh dear people are trying to communicating with them ovar teh intarwebz. Oh noes!
So who are those nasty people trying to talk to them then? Best find out. All the expensive consultant suit experts say you need identity management, and hey do they know identity. It's like passports, isn't it? But then come the problems:
They've burned themselves hard on ID cards.
But they (think they) need to hop on this "digital ID" bandwagon too, you know. Have to. No choice. Sooo... what better than to outsource all that, eh? Let someone else worry about the details. What do you say, my man?
I say, all sorts of upsides, old chap!
Like quick lead time. Easy roll-out. NO CULPABILITY. And so on. Fabulous!
Except that, say, requiring every citizen who wants to deal with the government "over teh intarwebz" to have a "fully verified" facebook account is its very own very special very short bus kind of very stupid.
Yes, you and I know just how stupid it is. But if you don't know that, it's not quite that bad. And they in fact do not know that. But they must do something. And this is something.
In fact, other than that, it's sheer brilliance. I dub this short bus brilliance, for short.