Apparently, there has been a recent increase in people looking to see how to renew their passports online, likely prompting traumatic flashbacks to the complete production meltdown at some federal offices during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
The federal bureaucracy has always been a drag in time and spirit, but work-from-home directives at the State Department during the pandemic appeared to really sink its passport operations to a new low.
Wait times for regular passport services took as long as 18 weeks in 2021, with a passport request backlog reaching between 1.5 and 2 million submissions, according to The Washington Post.
Such unacceptable wait times eventually prompted President Joe Biden to intervene via executive order. He directed the State Department to create an “online passport renewal experience that does not require any physical documents to be mailed.”
The obvious security issues aside, removing the postal service from the equation likely helped considerably.
Here’s a bit about what WFAA had to report about the directive and the recent uptick in interest in online passport renewals:
“Since then, the U.S. Department of State has initiated a series of ‘pilot programs,’ or windows during which people can apply online to have their passports renewed. The first such pilot program ran in August 2022, during which the State Department accepted 25,000 online applications.
“Additional rounds ran in the following months, before the program was paused. Now, there’s a spike in Google Trends showing people searching about online passport renewals in the U.S. again.”
To read more about this, click HERE.
