Passport Delays Are Causing Headaches for U.S. Travelers
Planning an international trip? Before outlining an itinerary or booking flights, you had better be sure your passport is up to date. If not, you may be joining the ranks of thousands of Americans who are having to cancel trips because their passport didn't arrive in time.
The United States is currently seeing an "unprecedented" demand for passports, with the U.S. State Department receiving about 400,000 applications per week as of July. And that's down slightly from January through May, when the federal department was seeing a record-breaking 500,000 applications each week.
In March, the department extended the standard processing time for a new or renewed passport to 10 to 13 weeks for routine service; or seven to nine weeks for those who pay a $60 fee for expedited service. However, many people are finding that the wait times have exceeded even 13 weeks.
In comparison, routine processing used to take about six to eight weeks and two to three weeks for expedited service.
To date, 2023 is set to surpass a record of 22 million passports issued last year. And the cause for the influx of passports, as well as the backlog, can unsurprisingly be chalked up to lingering effects from the pandemic.
When people stopped traveling internationally in 2020, the government laid off contractors and reassigned many staff that had been in charge of processing passports. But as the demand for travel returned, the department was unprepared for the sudden inundation.
"With COVID, the bottom basically dropped out of the system," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a House subcommittee on March 23.
To keep up with the demand, a spokesperson for the State Department told NPR that they were hiring more staff and authorizing overtime. The department also plans to launch a passport renewal website by the end of the year, which was likewise shelved during the pandemic. The new website should help process about a quarter of applications.
But in addition to COVID exacerbating passport application processing, the demand for U.S. passports has risen steadily over the past few decades.
Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, found that the number of U.S. passports per American has skyrocketed from about three per 100 in 1989 to nearly 46 per 100 in 2022.
"As a society gets richer, the people in that society say, 'I want to visit the rest of the world,'" Zagorsky told The Associated Press.
In the meantime, those who are fretting over whether or not they'll have to cancel their trips and potentially lose thousands of dollars are not alone. A Facebook group called U.S Passport Waiting Time now boasts 5,000 members, where travelers can share how long it took them to receive their passport after submitting an application.