Passport demand is ‘magnitudes’ higher, but State Dept isn’t seeing backlogs

Nearly half of all U.S. passport renewals are now happening online through a platform the State Department launched less than a year ago.

Matt Pierce, the acting principal deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Consular Affairs, said 94% of online passport renewal system users gave positive feedback in a recent survey, and 86% of them reported their experience increased their trust in government services.

The State Department fully launched its online passport renewal system to the public in September 2024. Before its launch, the paper-based process for renewing a passport remained largely unchanged since the 1970s. The State Department made unsuccessful attempts for more than a decade to launch an online passport renewal program.

“There was broad recognition that we needed to change, we needed to modernize, and we had to deliver on this,” Pierce said in a recent interview.

Pierce and Luis Coronado, Jr., the former chief information officer at the Bureau of Consular Affairs, received a Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal in June for their team’s work on the online passport renewal system.

The State Department began a pilot in 2022 that allowed federal employees and contractors to test the new system and renew their passports online.

Pierce said that during this soft launch, the State Department addressed some common issues, including making sure users upload headshots that meet the department’s requirements.

The department, he added, focused on “striking a balance” between making sure users were only uploading usable photos, while also ensuring users weren’t getting too frustrated with rejected photos.

Over the longer term, the State Department focused on creating a system that gave public users a better experience, but on the back end, still resembled the interface that passport adjudicators were used to.

“We needed a system that works for our customers and for internal users, and I think designing something like that was a challenge. What we ultimately settled on was designing a system that was largely the same on the back end for our adjudicators, but very different for our customers,” Pierce said.

The team was also able to make incremental changes to the system as the department got more feedback from customers.

“We didn’t have to wait for a new release or wait six months. These changes were made very quickly, which, I think, was key to the success of the rollout,” Pierce said.

The State Department is working on more updates to the online passport renewal system, including a version optimized for mobile browsers on smartphones. The agency is also looking at online tools to streamline visa applications and other public-facing services.

“This is something where we started with passports, but the entire Bureau of Consular Affairs and the department has a number of ways we interact both with our citizens and with our customers overseas. So leveraging technology is something we want to continue to expand on,” Pierce said.

The online passport renewal system is available for adult passport holders whose passports expired within the past five years or will expire within a year.

Online passport renewal is not available to renew children’s passports, apply for a first-time passport renewal or renew a passport while living outside the United States. Expedited passport processing is also not currently available using the online passport system.

‘We’re not seeing lines around passport agencies’

More broadly, the department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs is taking steps to ensure it has the workforce and capacity necessary to handle its workload and avoid lengthy processing times.

The State Department laid off more than 1,350 employees last month — about 15% of its total workforce. But Pierce said the Bureau of Consular Affairs is increasing staffing for passport adjudicators.

“Certainly there are changes to the department’s structure, but we continue to be committed to delivering on the services. We are expanding those options, leveraging technology better, and we’re expanding our staffing,” Pierce said. “We’ve not really seen impacts to passport services.”

The State Department, as part of a widespread reduction-in-force, laid off all employees at the Office of Planning and Program Support (PPS), a nerve center for passport services that handles budget execution, contract management and strategic planning. The department quickly reinstated PPS employees who received RIF notices.

In the coming years, Consular Affairs plans to open new passport agencies in San Antonio, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah; Kansas City, Missouri; Cincinnati, Ohio; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Orlando, Florida.

“These offices will be mainly to provide that urgent in-person service, so customers don’t have to travel long distances,” Pierce said. “If customers are well-prepared, make sure they have that valid passport in hand before they travel, hopefully they don’t even have to come in and see us. But if they do, we’ll be there, in those cities.”

To reduce last-minute passport renewal trips, the State Department is also sending emails and text messages to users, reminding them to renew their passports before planning international trips

“We’ve eliminated some of those last-minute urgent requests that were really resource-intensive in the past, and so that’s allowed us to use our resources more efficiently,” Pierce said.

The State Department struggled with seasonal backlogs of passport applications in recent years. The Bureau of Consular Affairs is largely funded through passport and visa application fees, and saw a steep drop-off in revenue at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, it wasn’t able to immediately hire more employees as travel and demand for passports returned.

Pierce said demand for passports is “magnitudes above last year and the year before,” but that the Bureau of Consular Affairs is processing applications more quickly and isn’t seeing backlogs.

“The fact is, we’re not seeing customers missing their trips. We’re not seeing lines around passport agencies, and we want that to be the norm, where we are staffed for our workload. We’re as efficient as possible,” Pierce said. “This should not be a periodic thing, where it takes a long time to get a passport, where customers may miss their trips. That is something we have to move away from.”

By December 2023, the State Department had passport processing times back to the pre-pandemic level of six to eight weeks for routine service. The department’s website states routine processing currently takes about four to six weeks.

Pierce said the bureau is increasing staffing levels to ensure it will be able to keep pace with its workload well into the future. Employees, he added, are also more productive.

“Even if you take the increased staffing out of it, we’re more efficient at the baseline level, across the organization, by many metrics,” Pierce said. “The adjudicators themselves have identified tons of enhancements and efficiencies, where we’ve taken an intentional step back and look at our procedures and say, ‘Hey, what adds value? What doesn’t add value? How can we change to move the work through the system quicker?”’

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