If you plan to travel someplace during the holiday season this year, run, don’t walk, to your local passport office. The backlog to issue passports and to renew them is long. The backlog of cases is so long that people are contacting their members of Congress for help.

Passports are issued by the State Department. The pandemic is over and everyone is eager to travel. The demand is so great that the State Department can’t keep up. Anthony Blinken recently spoke to the press and answered a question from a reporter who asked about speeding up the process with passports.

Second part first, I was just – I guess about three weeks ago – visiting our passport office in New York, the largest passport office that we have, and saw the operation firsthand and saw people working overtime, double time, triple time to get blue books into people’s hands. The demand for passports is greater than it’s ever been.

As you know, we’ve basically had to build back up from zero because when COVID hit, the bottom dropped out of the entire program to issue passports here in the United States or to issue visas to those seeking to visit the United States. And so we have been working very hard to build back – build that back up, to bring people in, to train them, to make sure that we were dedicating the resources to it.

We will issue more passports this year than in any previous year, but that’s just a reflection of the fact that demand is higher than it’s ever been. And we’re throwing everything we can at this, trying to make sure that people have those blue books, that they’re able to travel. And it’s something that comes up repeatedly with members of Congress, with folks that I come across. So what I can tell you is – and we can get you the actual numbers, but there’s unprecedented demand, there’s an unprecedented effort, and we’re trying to do our best at getting people their passports.

Here’s the thing – this administration is incapable of providing basic services for Americans. Time and time again, the Biden administration has proven to be reactive, not proactive, and this has produced crisis after crisis. For example, the United States had a baby formula shortage that was foreseeable if only someone in the Biden administration had bothered to notice. As far as passports go, are we to believe that no one thought that there might be pent-up energy to travel after the pandemic waned? Many Americans are anticipating travel to visit family and friends which was not possible during the pandemic. Americans want to travel overseas, too. Summertime is a prime time for Americans to travel overseas. This isn’t unusual during normal times.

Blinken uses the pandemic as an excuse. That is something this administration does, they blame the previous administration or the pandemic itself for its troubles. They think you are stupid. Is Blinken acting as though the State Department stopped working during the pandemic? It was still up and running, as other government agencies were during that time. There is no real excuse for not looking ahead and getting people in place to handle the workload when travel bans ended.

Now the burden is on congressional offices. Frustrated constituents are turning to their representatives and senators to help them out. Congressional offices typically handle maybe a couple of dozen requests to expedite passports each year but this year they are responding to requests from hundreds to thousands of people. The summer travel season has been the busiest. People are desperate to get their passports before it is time to travel.

This year, staffers for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (R) have waded through nearly 6,000 requests for help from those seeking new or renewed passports — double the number from all of 2022 and a 7,000% increase from pre-COVID levels.

Staffers for Virginia Sen. Mark Warner (D), who has called the situation a “crisis,” received more than 1,500 requests for passport help in the first six months of the year — up from fewer than 1,000 total from 2009 to 2020.

Aides to Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) fielded 767 requests for passport help from January through June — up from just 16 in the same period in 2019, before the pandemic.

Aides to Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy (D) have dealt with 535 passport cases this year — more than three times the total they had over the seven years before the pandemic.

“It’s worse than anyone realizes,” Aaron Fritschner, spokesperson for Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), told Axios. “I sit in the front office and often take calls when people get upset. It has been unlike anything I’ve seen.”

A spokesman said that more Americans have passports now than ever before – 46% today versus 30% in 2008.

About 400,000 passport applications are being received, which is down from 500,000 earlier this year. There will likely be a record number of passports issued this year. Last year that number was 22 million. Regional offices are having to turn down congressional requests because of their backlogs and reject scheduling appointments. There are exceptions for extreme situations like someone needing to travel for a funeral.

Workers are working thousands of hours in overtime and new staffers are being hired and trained. All of the new hiring and training should have been done more than a year ago. This is what is so frustrating about the Biden administration. No one seems able to look at the long-term picture and plan ahead. They are constantly being caught flat-footed. Remember that when Biden ran for president in 2020 he said he would fill his administration with government professionals, people who know how to get things done. Yet, time and time again, it is crisis after crisis. The level of incompetency, even for basic government services, is astounding.

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