The Passing of the Passport Crisis
The Department of State announced on September 7th that it had “restored passport service to the standard six to eight week processing time.” We know now that they have, indeed, restored service back to normal, so we give you the following commentary from an “insider” in the passport and visa world.
The “passport crisis” now exits the stage of the media and Congress, but before we turn away, it is worthwhile to look back at how this “crisis” unfolded and then ended.
After the tragedy of September 11, 2001, Congress was understandably concerned about keeping dangerous people who do not belong here from entering the United States. One serious problem in border enforcement was that U.S. Customs officials at the border were required to re-admit U.S. citizens returning from Mexico, Canada and most countries in the Caribbean with only a driver’s license and a birth certificate.
That meant that customs agents at the border had to be able to recognize 6,000 different birth certificates, from various counties, cities and states that have been issued over the last 80 years. Not only were they difficult to authenticate as valid, they were sometimes frayed and hard to read, and unlike the new e passport, they could be created fraudulently with relative ease.
In December 2004, Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act. Among other things the law required that to re-enter the U.S., all citizens must have a passport or a passcard, a new, yet-to-be-issued credit card size version of the passport. Under this new law, instead of authenticating birth certificates, customs agents at the border need only scan a passport or passport card — not only more secure but much quicker.
The State and Homeland Security Departments decided to implement the law in phases with the first phase, implemented on January 23, 2007, requiring a passport for all air travel re-entry into the U.S. To forecast the increased passport demand expected as a result of the new law, the Department of State had earlier hired BearingPoint, a McLean, Virginia consulting firm with 17,000 employees, to study U. S. border crossing and international travel trends. BearingPoint made a forecast of expected passport demand under the new law and Passport Services planned accordingly.
The BearingPoint forecast was presciently accurate on the number of applications that would be received in the first year, but erred in not foreseeing the freight train of applications headed our way in the first few months after the new law’s implementation. Within a month of the January 23rd implementation, Passport Services, the agency of the State Department charged with issuing passports, had a huge national problem on its hands.
Thousand of citizens missed trips. Others had to wait in long, slow lines at passport offices and hundreds of thousands of applicants waited stressfully for months wondering if their passports would arrive in time for their trip abroad. They were understandably angry that it was taking as long as four months to get a passport. At one point, the backlog of unprocessed applications approached three million.
Applicants were calling members of Congress and complaining bitterly about the delays in issuing passports, and they made their unhappiness unknown to the State Department.
“It is unacceptable that American citizens were missing trips because the State Department did not fully anticipate the increase in passport applications and take appropriate action to increase processing resources,” said a letter signed by 56 senators. Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Lantos, said, “None of [the late passport issuances] should have been necessary; for lack of simple foresight, the Administration has placed tremendous strain on …the public…”
The media joined the chorus. “Market Watch,” an online newsletter published by Dow Jones, said, “Thanks, Maura Harty [Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs]. You’ve made my vacation and millions of other Americans’ the source of anxiety, frustration and disgust. The passport agency under your control regularly lies and provides misinformation.”
All this noise from Congress and the media notwithstanding, Passport Services got the job done well under the worst of circumstances and dug out of a hole that, in retrospect, realistically no one could have foreseen – there was just no way of knowing for sure how the demand for passports was going to be effected by the new law. And Passport Services did not lie or deliberately provide misinformation. Nothing like this level of passport demand had ever been encountered by the State Department in the history of our country. By the end of this year, the annual passport demand will have increased from 12 million to perhaps as many as 18 million.
When the problem slammed into Passport Services, the State Department management pulled out all the stops to meet the demand surge. They brought diplomats and passport adjudicators out of retirement. They redirected new Presidential Management Fellows from taking management positions in the government to processing passports. They vetted and hired hundreds of new passport processors and started the months-long training to qualify them as passport adjudicators.
Carefully adjudicating and issuing 18 million passports in one year is, by any measure, an extraordinary achievement. Every single applicant has to be checked to ensure they are, indeed, a citizen; that they are entitled to have a passport – for example, persons with arrears of $2,500 or more in child support payments are not entitled; and that persons applying are properly identified as the person they say they are.
The employees of our firm deal every business day with seven of Passport Services’ 14 regional offices. We watch Passport Services’ employees deal with the public, and I can testify that they gave – and give — their very best to accommodate every applicant. Watching the passport office at work reminds me of a hospital emergency room: every applicant expects immediate attention and resents having to wait.
Every day, we see citizens appear at regional passport agencies all over the country that need an emergency passport for a funeral, sick relative, sudden vacations or myriad other reasons. The employees at the passport agency do everything they can to help them, yet do so without ever compromising passport security by carelessly issuing a passport to someone who should not receive one.
One day, I walked on the street by the Washington Passport Agency and ran into an acquaintance who works at the Agency. He was taking a break from the long, intense days. We chatted and he spontaneously invited me to take a quick tour of the agency. I walked through and saw every person working as hard as any of the people in my own business. Over in one corner, I recognized the director of the Washington Passport Agency operating a machine that prints passports. I asked her why she was doing that, and she explained that the operator of the equipment was out that day and the job had to be done. She did not know I would be touring the agency and was surprised to see me, but there sat the top person filling in for an absentee. That’s the spirit that we taxpayers are getting at Passport Services.
And that is the spirit we encounter every day at Passport Services. I do not agree with the criticism of the agency personnel or its management.
They did an excellent job in the most difficult period of their history and now they are caught up and back to normal. The crisis is over. While we all regret the delays, I am proud of the job done by the Department of State and Passport Services, and I feel safer about our control over who is allowed into the United States of America.
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