Getting a U.S. passport may not have gotten any faster in the past week, but it may have gotten a little bit fairer for those with last-minute needs: The State Department now requires a phone call to make an emergency appointment, rather than making one online. The move is designed to defeat services that have used bots to snap up all the available appointments and then sell them to the desperate for up to hundreds of dollars.
And those are appointments for people who are within 72 hours of travel. But even for non-emergency situations, there’s little sign of let-up in the slow pace that has made 18 weeks the norm for getting a passport, or 12 weeks with payment of a priority fee of $60. The situation has the potential of canceling trips for many families.
And that’s turned up the political pressure to get a change in place fast; several Senators have introduced bills to speed up the process and others have urged getting more passport workers back into offices. Some have called for a one-time several month extension of all expiring passports to break up the clog.
Senators and Representatives are particularly aware of the issues, because one traditional route to a passport in an emergency is through their offices; they have an official special contact at State to enable them to solve constituent emergencies. Sen. Manchin of West Virginia told the Secretary of State that In years past, my office has received an average of five passport cases per month. Currently, my office receives at least five passport cases per day.”
