State Adjusts Time Frame on Passports

By Stephen Barr
(c) 2007, The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Overwhelmed by the public's demand for passports, the State Department Thursday announced that travelers paying an extra $60 for speedy processing of their passport applications should check the Web to see how long they will have to wait.
The department, in a Federal Register notice, said it has changed the definition of "expedited passport processing" from three business days to a more accordion-like standard — "a number of business days."
Rather than process a passport within three days of receipt of an application, the State Department's Web site, travel.state.gov., said it will take 10 days for internal processing.
That would put "door to door" expedited service at about three weeks, not much different than the two to three weeks that applicants have waited for much of the summer after paying the expedited fee.
In past years, the department has been able to issue a routine passport in four to six weeks. Now, with passports in high demand, the current wait for routine passport processing is 10 to 12 weeks, according to Thursday's Web notice.
While department officials said the Federal Register notice was intended to allow them to better advise the public on what to expect and to reflect the realities of their workload, members of Congress took it as another sign that State continues to struggle with how to speed up passport processing.
"This is a clear admission of failure and a decision not to solve the problem, leaving thousands of travelers in the lurch," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.
Demand for passports soared at the beginning of the year as travelers sought to comply with a new border security law requiring passports for all U.S. citizens flying within the Western Hemisphere.
By June, nearly 3 million Americans were waiting for passports and many were calling members of Congress to complain that they were fearful of missing overseas trips. Officials plan to have the backlog whittled down by year's end and to get back to processing passports within six weeks.
The surge has disrupted some State Department offices, with employees being pulled off normal duties to adjudicate and process passports. Even U.S. embassy staffers in London, Mexico City and New Delhi have been called on to help process passports, the Financial Times reported.
To meet the cost of the extra demand, the department published a notice on Wednesday saying that it would retain $20, instead of $6, from each passport fee collected. The change will not affect what citizens pay for passports (for routine processing, $97 for persons 16 and older and $82 for those under 16). But the change will reduce cash flowing into the Treasury Department's general fund.
The demand has driven up processing costs to nearly $1 billion, State said in the notice. The most recent estimate shows that State's cost for the new law will be $944 million from fiscal 2008 to 2010.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the extra $14 per passport that State will hold back from the Treasury will be used to hire 400 passport adjudicators, managers and support personnel this year and an additional 400 in fiscal 2008.
The department also will open new passport offices "to enhance customer service around the country," he said.

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