The US passport office is completely overwhelmed with applications and still facing a staffing shortage that's preventing thousands of travellers from getting their paperwork in time for tickets they've already bought.
So grim is the outlook that US officials aren’t even denying the problem or predicting when it will ease.
They’re blaming the epic wait times on lingering pandemic-related staffing shortages and a pause in online processing this year. That has flooded the passport agency with a record-busting 500,000 applications a week.
The deluge is on track to top last year’s 22 million passports issued, the State Department says.
So if you're planning on ordering a passport for a summer trip - be aware that the current estimated wait time for a new passport during summer 2023 is around 11 to 13 weeks.
Sometimes they process quicker, but for the last half-year it's taken the office around three months to process an application.
Even paying the fee for a sped-up passport may not get you there in time. Those take about a month, and now it can take a few weeks on top of that.
With family dreams and big money on the line, passport seekers describe a slow-motion agony of waiting, worrying, holding the line, refreshing the screen, complaining to Congress, paying extra fees and following incorrect directions.
Some applicants are buying additional plane tickets to snag in-process passports where they sit — in other cities — in time to make the flights they booked in the first place.
By March, concerned travellers began asking for answers and then demanding help, including from their representatives in the House and Senate, who widely reported at hearings this year that they were receiving more complaints from constituents on passport delays than any other issue.
The US secretary of state had an answer of a sort.
“With COVID, the bottom basically dropped out of the system,” Antony Blinken told a House subcommittee on March 23. When demand for travel all but disappeared during the pandemic, he said, the government let contractors go and reassigned staff that had been dedicated to handling passports.
Around the same time, the government also halted an online renewal system “to make sure that we can fine-tune it and improve it,” Blinken said. He said the department is hiring agents as quickly as possible, opening more appointments and trying to address the crisis in other ways.
Passport applicants lit up social media groups, toll-free numbers and lawmakers’ phone lines with questions, appeals for advice and cries for help. Facebook and WhatsApp groups bristled with reports of bewilderment and fury. Reddit published eye-watering diaries, some more than 1,000 words long, of application dates, deposits submitted, contacts made, time on hold, money spent and appeals for advice.
It was 1952 when a law required, for the first time, passports for every US traveller abroad, even in peacetime. Now, passports are processed at centres around the country and printed at secure facilities in Washington, DC and Mississippi, according to the Government Printing Office.
But the number of Americans holding valid US passports has grown at roughly 10% faster than the population over the past three decades, according to Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
