WASHINGTON — The State Department said Friday that it had crawled out from under the mountain of backlogged passport applications that had overwhelmed its offices, and that the average processing time had fallen to six to eight weeks from months.
But skeptics say the backlog could return once the department disbands the task forces it mustered to deal with the problem.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday, September 21, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 52 words Type of Material: Correction
Passports: A Sept. 8 article in Business about U.S. officials' declaring an end to the passport application backlog said federal regulations requiring travelers to present passports for land and sea travel outside the United States would take effect in January. State Department officials say the rules will take effect in summer 2008.
Last week, scores of federal workers who had been posted to Bucharest, Romania; Copenhagen; Johannesburg, South Africa; Seoul and other foreign capitals were instead processing passports in a half-empty office just south of the National Mall in Washington. Two other teams, in New Orleans and Portsmouth, N.H., had also been drafted.
In the Washington office, boxes of applications from California, Minnesota, Massachusetts and a handful of other states lined the walls. Workers scanned them into a digital database by hand, eyeballing the handwriting, photos, attached birth and naturalization certificates for signs of fraud before stamping them "approved."
"There's never a lull," said John Crippen, 43, a foreign service officer from Little Rock, Ark., assigned to the task force with his wife, Ramona Crippen, 47, before they begin new jobs in Juarez, Mexico.
The task force of 153 processes as many as 11,000 passports a day, flagging about 1,000 for problems. An additional 53 workers are assigned to New Orleans; 63 to Portsmouth and 52 to other offices nationwide.
Many of the workers, mostly from the civil and foreign service, have been retrained for eight-week stints here, where they live in hotels or temporary apartments and receive stipends for meals and expenses.
But critics, including members of the passport workers' union, say the task forces are an expensive Band-Aid that fails to address the underlying problem: the need for more experienced passport processing staff as demand grows.
As of July, the State Department had issued about 14 million passports for the year, up from 12.1 million a year earlier. It expects to issue 23 million next year, 26 million in 2009 and 30 million in 2010.
Passport demand began to climb last year in anticipation of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, new federal rules requiring air travelers to nearby countries, including Mexico, to travel with passports rather than just driver's licenses or birth certificates.
