“Historically, the demand’s been cyclical, the busy season is kind of March to late summer, but basically it’s full time now,” Blinken said. “We were authorizing overtime, we’ve opened satellite offices, we’re organizing cores at the headquarters to assist in processing, processing times.”
Passport waits are stifling Oregonians’ wanderlust, says bipartisan D.C. delegation
Published 4:33 pm Thursday, June 29, 2023
- U.S. passports
Three years after the COVID-19 pandemic slammed the door shut on much foreign travel, Americans’ pent-up demand to see world wonders or lie on South Pacific beaches is exploding. But the key document needed to wing off to another continent — a U.S. passport — is becoming difficult to get in time for a summer vacation.
In a rare show of bipartisan unanimity, Oregon’s two Democratic senators, four Democratic U.S. House members, and two Republican U.S. House members signed on to a letter asserting the U.S. State Department has to ramp up its poor passport processing times.
“Over the last year, passport requests have increased by 30 to 40 percent, with routine processing times increasing to 10 to 13 weeks and expedited processing times increasing to 7 to 9 weeks,” the lawmakers wrote in a joint letter to Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Consular Affairs Rena Bitter. Demand for new passports and renewals have surged with the sharp drop in impact of the COVID-19 on international travel.
“With a drastic uptick in international travel, it’s urgent that Congress, the State Department, and other agencies work together to do all they can to help ease the logjams,” wrote Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.
U.S. Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Happy Valley, said travel can be a big boost to the economy after the pandemic.
“But long passport renewal wait times have kept them from taking off,” Chavez-DeRemer wrote.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told a congressional hearing in March that the demand for passports was becoming a tsunami.
The traditional passport — called a “passport book” — costs $130 to renew. For a first-time applicant, there’s an additional $35 fee. The passports can usually get back to applicants quicker if they pay the additional $60 “expedited” fee.
But State Department officials say that the massive post-pandemic demand for the documents, and a staff hollowed out during the more than two years when overseas travel dropped sharply, mean that even with the “speed-it-up” payment, it can take up to nine weeks to get documents back to applicants.
With demand still high, delaying applications could just make matters worse. State Department officials estimated that the wait time for mailing in a passport application and getting the document back had risen to as much as three months in early spring to as long as four months now, at peak summer travel season.
