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Washington: seeking A valid US passport For that 2023 flight? Buckle up, wannabe traveler, for a totally different ride before you step anywhere near the airport.
A backup is dreaded by many US passport applications It has hit a wall of government bureaucracy as travel around the world rebounds toward pre-pandemic record levels – with too few humans to bear the burden. The result, say ambitious travelers in the United States and around the world, is a pre-travel frenzy defined, at best, by costly uncertainty.
With family dreams and big money at stake, passport applicants describe the slow pain of waiting, worrying, holding line, refreshing a screen, complaining to Congress, paying extra fees, and following incorrect directions. Some applicants buy additional airline tickets to obtain passports during the process as they sit down – in other cities – in time to take the flights they booked in the first place.
The forecast is so grim that US officials do not deny the problem or predict when it will subside. They blame the epic wait times on ongoing staffing shortages linked to the pandemic and the cessation of online processing this year. This left the passport agency overwhelmed with a record-breaking 500,000 applications per week. The State Department said Deluge is on track to issue more than 22 million passports last year.
Stories from applicants and interviews conducted by the Associated Press depict a system of crisis management, in which agencies prioritize urgent cases such as applicants traveling for “life-or-death” reasons and those whose travel time is only a few days. For others, the options are few and expensive.
So, traveler 2023, if you still need a valid US passport, get ready for an unplanned trip in the nightmare zone.
“plenty of time” for “we’ll still be alright” for big problems
It was early March when Dallas florist Ginger Collier applied for four passports before a family vacation at the end of June. The writer said, the employee estimated waiting times to be between eight and 11 weeks. They had their passports a month before they needed them. “A lot of the time,” Collier recalls thinking.
The State Department then raised the waiting time for a regular passport to up to 13 weeks. “We’ll still be fine,” she said.
In the T-minus two weeks to travel, this was her assessment: “I can’t sleep.” This is after months of calling, hanging up, pressing for an update on a website, impeaching her congresswoman — and confirmation that her departure date is on the horizon. She said that failure to obtain family passports would mean losing $4,000, as well as the chance to meet one of her sons in Italy after a semester abroad.
“My nerves are injured,” she said, “because I might not be able to get to him.” She calls the toll-free number every day, and holds it for up to 90 minutes to tell — at best — that she might be able to get a needed appointment at passport offices in other states.
“I can’t afford four more plane tickets anywhere in the United States to get a passport when I applied so long ago,” she said. “What if they only process my passports?”
The US government has the culprit: COVID
By March, concerned travelers began asking for answers and then seeking help, including from their representatives in the House and Senate, who reported widely in hearings this year that they were getting more complaints from voters about passport delays than on any issue. other.
The US Secretary of State had some kind of answer.
“With Covid, the bottom of the system has pulled out,” Anthony Blinken told a House subcommittee on March 23. And when the demand for travel disappeared during the pandemic, the government let go of contractors and rehired staff who had been dedicated to handling passports.
Around the same time, the government also shut down the online renewal system “to make sure we can adjust and improve it,” Blinken said. He said the ministry is appointing agents as soon as possible, opening more appointments and trying to handle the crisis in other ways.
Passport applicants have lit up social media groups, toll-free numbers and lawmakers’ phone lines with questions, pleas for advice and cries for help. Facebook and WhatsApp groups have received reports of bewilderment and anger. Reddit posted dazzling memos, some over 1,000 words long, on application dates, deposits made, contacts made, time held, money spent, and appeals for advice.
It was in 1952 when, for the first time, a law mandated passports for every American traveler abroad, even in peacetime. Now, passports are processed at centers across the country and printed at secure facilities in Washington, D.C. and Mississippi, according to the State Printing Office.
But the number of Americans is a valid contract US passports It has grown roughly 10% faster than the population over the past three decades, according to Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Boston University’s Kostrom School of Business.
After passport delays disrupted his plans to travel to London earlier this year, Zagorski found that the number of US passports per American had risen from about three per 100 people in 1989 to nearly 46 per 100 people in 2022. Americans, it turns out, are on the move.
“When a society becomes richer, people in that society say, ‘I want to visit the rest of the world,'” Zagorski says.
For Americans and others abroad, it’s no picnic either
At US consulates abroad, the search for US visas and passports could not be brighter.
On a June day, people in New Delhi can expect to wait 451 days for their visa interview, according to the website. Sao Paulo residents can plan to wait more than 600 days. Ambitious travelers in Mexico City had a wait of about 750 days; In Bogota, Colombia, that was 801 days.
In Israel, the need is particularly acute. More than 200,000 people with citizenship of both countries live in Israel. It is one appointment per person, even for newborns, for whom both parents must be involved in the process, before traveling to the United States.
Batsheva Guterman began looking for three dates right after having a baby in December, with an eye toward attending her sister’s wedding in July, in Raleigh, NC.
Her pursuit of three passports spanned from January to June, days before she was due to travel. And it only resolved after Gutterman paid a small fee to join the WhatsApp group that alerted her to new appointments, which only stays available for a few seconds. I eventually got three appointments in three days in a row — bureaucracy epitomized.
“We had to transport the whole family with three young children, an hour and a half to Tel Aviv three days in a row, taking work and school off,” she said. “It makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable having a baby in Israel as an American citizen, and I know there’s no way I can travel with that baby until we’re lucky enough to go on a date.”
Recently, there seemed to be some progress. The wait for an appointment to renew a US passport reached 360 days on June 8. And on July 2nd, the wait was reduced to 90 days, according to the website.
Depressing tales emerge from the trenches
Back in the US, Marnie Larsen of Holladay, Utah, stood in line in Los Angeles, California, on June 14, hoping to get her son’s passport. In this way, she hoped, the couple would be able to meet the rest of their family, who had already departed as scheduled for Europe, for a long-planned vacation.
She had applied for her son’s passport two months earlier and had spent weeks checking for updates online or through a frustrating call system. With the mid-June recess approaching, Larsen reached out to Sen. Mitt Romney’s office, where one of four people who, he says, work full-time for passport issues, managed to track down the document in New Orleans.
It was supposed to be shipped to Los Angeles, where I got an appointment to get it back. This meant Larsen had to buy her and her son new tickets to Los Angeles and redirect their flight from there to Rome. It’s all on the bet that her son’s passport has indeed been shipped as promised.
“We’re just waiting in this huge line of people,” Larsen said. “It was just a nightmare.”
They succeed. But not everyone is so lucky.
Miranda Richter has personally applied to renew passports for herself and her husband, as well as applying for a new one on February 9 for a trip with their neighbors to Croatia on June 6.
Her schedule went like this: Her husband and daughter’s passports arrived at 11 weeks, while Richter’s photo was rejected. On May 4th, I sent a new letter through Priority Mail. She then paid a $79 express fee, which was never charged to her credit card. Between May 30 and June 2, four days before travel, Richter and her husband spent more than 12 hours on the National Passport line calling congressmen, senators, and third-party couriers.
Finally, I showed up in person at the Federal Building in downtown Houston, 30 minutes before the passport office opened. Richter said there were at least 100 people in line.
“The security guard asked when my appointment was, and I just burst into tears,” she recalls. Couldn’t get one. “It didn’t work.”
Finally: a happy ending
“I just got my passports!” Ginger Collier Texts.
She ended up going to the Passport Office in Dallas with her daughter-in-law at 6:30 in the morning, and she was sorted into groups and lined up against the walls. Finally, they were summoned to a window, where the agent was “very kind” and withdrew all four of the family’s applications—the papers that had been in the office since March 17th. More than seven hours later, the two left the office with directions to collect their passports the next day.
They did – with four days to go.
“What a ridiculous process,” says Collier. Still, the reunion with her son in Italy was sweet. You wrote last week: “It was the best hug ever!”
A backup is dreaded by many US passport applications It has hit a wall of government bureaucracy as travel around the world rebounds toward pre-pandemic record levels – with too few humans to bear the burden. The result, say ambitious travelers in the United States and around the world, is a pre-travel frenzy defined, at best, by costly uncertainty.
With family dreams and big money at stake, passport applicants describe the slow pain of waiting, worrying, holding line, refreshing a screen, complaining to Congress, paying extra fees, and following incorrect directions. Some applicants buy additional airline tickets to obtain passports during the process as they sit down – in other cities – in time to take the flights they booked in the first place.
The forecast is so grim that US officials do not deny the problem or predict when it will subside. They blame the epic wait times on ongoing staffing shortages linked to the pandemic and the cessation of online processing this year. This left the passport agency overwhelmed with a record-breaking 500,000 applications per week. The State Department said Deluge is on track to issue more than 22 million passports last year.
Stories from applicants and interviews conducted by the Associated Press depict a system of crisis management, in which agencies prioritize urgent cases such as applicants traveling for “life-or-death” reasons and those whose travel time is only a few days. For others, the options are few and expensive.
So, traveler 2023, if you still need a valid US passport, get ready for an unplanned trip in the nightmare zone.
“plenty of time” for “we’ll still be alright” for big problems
It was early March when Dallas florist Ginger Collier applied for four passports before a family vacation at the end of June. The writer said, the employee estimated waiting times to be between eight and 11 weeks. They had their passports a month before they needed them. “A lot of the time,” Collier recalls thinking.
The State Department then raised the waiting time for a regular passport to up to 13 weeks. “We’ll still be fine,” she said.
In the T-minus two weeks to travel, this was her assessment: “I can’t sleep.” This is after months of calling, hanging up, pressing for an update on a website, impeaching her congresswoman — and confirmation that her departure date is on the horizon. She said that failure to obtain family passports would mean losing $4,000, as well as the chance to meet one of her sons in Italy after a semester abroad.
“My nerves are injured,” she said, “because I might not be able to get to him.” She calls the toll-free number every day, and holds it for up to 90 minutes to tell — at best — that she might be able to get a needed appointment at passport offices in other states.
“I can’t afford four more plane tickets anywhere in the United States to get a passport when I applied so long ago,” she said. “What if they only process my passports?”
The US government has the culprit: COVID
By March, concerned travelers began asking for answers and then seeking help, including from their representatives in the House and Senate, who reported widely in hearings this year that they were getting more complaints from voters about passport delays than on any issue. other.
The US Secretary of State had some kind of answer.
“With Covid, the bottom of the system has pulled out,” Anthony Blinken told a House subcommittee on March 23. And when the demand for travel disappeared during the pandemic, the government let go of contractors and rehired staff who had been dedicated to handling passports.
Around the same time, the government also shut down the online renewal system “to make sure we can adjust and improve it,” Blinken said. He said the ministry is appointing agents as soon as possible, opening more appointments and trying to handle the crisis in other ways.
Passport applicants have lit up social media groups, toll-free numbers and lawmakers’ phone lines with questions, pleas for advice and cries for help. Facebook and WhatsApp groups have received reports of bewilderment and anger. Reddit posted dazzling memos, some over 1,000 words long, on application dates, deposits made, contacts made, time held, money spent, and appeals for advice.
It was in 1952 when, for the first time, a law mandated passports for every American traveler abroad, even in peacetime. Now, passports are processed at centers across the country and printed at secure facilities in Washington, D.C. and Mississippi, according to the State Printing Office.
But the number of Americans is a valid contract US passports It has grown roughly 10% faster than the population over the past three decades, according to Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Boston University’s Kostrom School of Business.
After passport delays disrupted his plans to travel to London earlier this year, Zagorski found that the number of US passports per American had risen from about three per 100 people in 1989 to nearly 46 per 100 people in 2022. Americans, it turns out, are on the move.
“When a society becomes richer, people in that society say, ‘I want to visit the rest of the world,'” Zagorski says.
For Americans and others abroad, it’s no picnic either
At US consulates abroad, the search for US visas and passports could not be brighter.
On a June day, people in New Delhi can expect to wait 451 days for their visa interview, according to the website. Sao Paulo residents can plan to wait more than 600 days. Ambitious travelers in Mexico City had a wait of about 750 days; In Bogota, Colombia, that was 801 days.
In Israel, the need is particularly acute. More than 200,000 people with citizenship of both countries live in Israel. It is one appointment per person, even for newborns, for whom both parents must be involved in the process, before traveling to the United States.
Batsheva Guterman began looking for three dates right after having a baby in December, with an eye toward attending her sister’s wedding in July, in Raleigh, NC.
Her pursuit of three passports spanned from January to June, days before she was due to travel. And it only resolved after Gutterman paid a small fee to join the WhatsApp group that alerted her to new appointments, which only stays available for a few seconds. I eventually got three appointments in three days in a row — bureaucracy epitomized.
“We had to transport the whole family with three young children, an hour and a half to Tel Aviv three days in a row, taking work and school off,” she said. “It makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable having a baby in Israel as an American citizen, and I know there’s no way I can travel with that baby until we’re lucky enough to go on a date.”
Recently, there seemed to be some progress. The wait for an appointment to renew a US passport reached 360 days on June 8. And on July 2nd, the wait was reduced to 90 days, according to the website.
Depressing tales emerge from the trenches
Back in the US, Marnie Larsen of Holladay, Utah, stood in line in Los Angeles, California, on June 14, hoping to get her son’s passport. In this way, she hoped, the couple would be able to meet the rest of their family, who had already departed as scheduled for Europe, for a long-planned vacation.
She had applied for her son’s passport two months earlier and had spent weeks checking for updates online or through a frustrating call system. With the mid-June recess approaching, Larsen reached out to Sen. Mitt Romney’s office, where one of four people who, he says, work full-time for passport issues, managed to track down the document in New Orleans.
It was supposed to be shipped to Los Angeles, where I got an appointment to get it back. This meant Larsen had to buy her and her son new tickets to Los Angeles and redirect their flight from there to Rome. It’s all on the bet that her son’s passport has indeed been shipped as promised.
“We’re just waiting in this huge line of people,” Larsen said. “It was just a nightmare.”
They succeed. But not everyone is so lucky.
Miranda Richter has personally applied to renew passports for herself and her husband, as well as applying for a new one on February 9 for a trip with their neighbors to Croatia on June 6.
Her schedule went like this: Her husband and daughter’s passports arrived at 11 weeks, while Richter’s photo was rejected. On May 4th, I sent a new letter through Priority Mail. She then paid a $79 express fee, which was never charged to her credit card. Between May 30 and June 2, four days before travel, Richter and her husband spent more than 12 hours on the National Passport line calling congressmen, senators, and third-party couriers.
Finally, I showed up in person at the Federal Building in downtown Houston, 30 minutes before the passport office opened. Richter said there were at least 100 people in line.
“The security guard asked when my appointment was, and I just burst into tears,” she recalls. Couldn’t get one. “It didn’t work.”
Finally: a happy ending
“I just got my passports!” Ginger Collier Texts.
She ended up going to the Passport Office in Dallas with her daughter-in-law at 6:30 in the morning, and she was sorted into groups and lined up against the walls. Finally, they were summoned to a window, where the agent was “very kind” and withdrew all four of the family’s applications—the papers that had been in the office since March 17th. More than seven hours later, the two left the office with directions to collect their passports the next day.
They did – with four days to go.
“What a ridiculous process,” says Collier. Still, the reunion with her son in Italy was sweet. You wrote last week: “It was the best hug ever!”
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