Passport delays: Understaffing, surge in demand frustrate New Yorkers trying to travel

A surging demand for passports, combined with understaffing in the federal agency that's responsible for processing them, has jeopardized travel plans for many Long Islanders, officials said.

Those in limbo include Rosiri Corona, an auditor from Farmingdale who started the application process in the spring and spent weeks trying to reach operators on a National Passport Information Center hotline to get passports for a long-planned family vacation to Mexico.

Sometimes she got an automated message telling her she was being disconnected because of high call volume, she said. It got so bad that she began calling daily at 30 seconds after 7:58 a.m. to beat the call center’s 8 a.m. opening rush. Even when she got through, though, “There were no appointments in the entire country.”

Once she was offered an appointment at a passport agency in Detroit, she said, but in the instant she took to consider the logistics of getting her baby and 6-year-old to Michigan, somebody else filled the slot. She described her weekslong experience as “all-consuming” and “frustrating.” Her family missed its July 2 flight, but, in a moment of optimism, rebooked for mid-August. The family still does not have passports, though she learned late last week that her applications were approved.

People traveling internationally within 14 days can get urgent travel service at a passport agency, but those facilities only serve people by appointment, so would-be travelers sometimes go to whatever facility can offer them one, even if that means traveling out of state.

Understaffing, travel surge driving passport delays

The reasons for the delays lie partly in a staffing shortage that goes back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a March 23 congressional hearing. “With COVID, the bottom basically dropped out on the system,” he said. “We had to let go or rededicate personnel to do other things … The contractors that we had working on this, we let go.” 

At the same time, he said, there’s been an “unprecedented demand” for post-pandemic travel, with Americans making up to 500,000 applications for new passports per week, sometimes twice as many applications as were made in the same week last year. Since May, though, the rate has dropped to about 400,000 a week. About 46% of Americans now have passports, more than at any time in the nation’s history.

According to the State Department, almost 22 million passports were issued in fiscal year 2022, the most in history; 151 million passports were in circulation. In New York, 1.4 million passports were issued, making it one of the highest demand states in the country. 

“Every year at this time it gets crazy, but not this crazy — this year took the cake,” said Sam Nektalov, who owns Rushpassport.com, a passport and visa expediting service in Manhattan.

Until days ago, Zi Wu of Kew Gardens, Queens thought he might miss a cousin's wedding on Friday in Cancun, Mexico — delayed during the pandemic — because he still didn't have his passport. Wu started the passport renewal process in the spring and estimated he’s called the hotline 40 to 50 times.

Unable to get an appointment at the New York Passport Agency in downtown Manhattan, which also serves Long Island, he had planned to travel to an agency in Stamford, Connecticut, before getting notified late last week that his passport would arrive at his home Tuesday, three days before his planned flight.

“This has been my life for the past week,” he said. “I skipped going to the gym, hanging out with friends. I’m wasting a whole week of my life that’s just been dedicated to seeing how I can resolve this.” 

Maria Sideras, a stay-at-home mother from Babylon, said she’d spent $10,000 on nonrefundable plane tickets to take her family of four to her father’s memorial service in Italy this summer and then visit her in-laws in Cyprus. 

In the spring, she mailed a passport renewal application for her 6-year-old son, Niko, applying early partly because she knew Niko, who has autism, wouldn’t tolerate waiting in line at a passport agency. She heard nothing for months. On June 14, she said, she called the passport hotline and waited three hours on hold. When she got through, in what she estimates was a 20-second conversation, an operator advised her to fill out a form for expedited processing.

Her credit card still hasn’t been billed for the service, and her family’s flight leaves July 20. She’s already contacted the offices of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Rep. Andrew Garbarino, she said. “I don’t know what else to do.” 

Processing passports taking up to 13 weeks

All those people started their application process in March, around the time the State Department extended its passport processing times by two weeks, bringing the expected wait to 10 to 13 weeks for routine requests and seven to nine for expedited. Processing times have in some cases doubled this year. Applications filed before Feb. 6 typically took six to nine weeks for routine processing, according to the State Department. 

Applications for new passports can be submitted at an acceptance facility, like a local post office or library. Renewal applications can be submitted by mail. State Department passport agencies and centers like the New York Passport Agency — which both Corona and Wu said they tried to use — provide in-person services to customers who have urgent international travel within 14 days, but generally only to people with appointments made through the hotline.

In an email, Garbarino (R-Bayport) said the problem seemed especially bad for applicants trying to use the New York Passport Agency. “This latest backlog has brought the process to a complete standstill and is reportedly the result of severe understaffing” at the agency. That agency “is operating well beyond the posted processing time period.” 

A spokeswoman for Garbarino, Kristen Cianci, said in an interview that the congressman’s office was fielding “hundreds of calls a day from constituents asking for updates” about passports. In the past, the office has worked with the New York agency to expedite constituent requests, but “in the last three weeks we’ve seen a complete lack of responsiveness” from the agency. Garbarino staffers who asked their counterparts there about the agency’s performance were told “there is a staffing shortage … it doesn’t appear they’re actively seeking to fill those vacancies.” In recent weeks, she said, “we’ve sent people to Buffalo, we’ve sent people to Vermont” to agencies with available appointments. 

Blinken said authorities have responded by hiring new staff and authorizing overtime to process passport applications, opening satellites and experimenting with online passport renewals. That initiative was paused in March to make changes based on customer feedback, but should reopen by the end of this year, according to the department.

A department spokeswoman declined an interview request and, in an emailed response to written questions, did not specifically address the situation at the New York agency. But she said that wait times were the same around the country. Processing of every American's request entails "extensive vetting of their identity, claim to U.S. citizenship, and entitlement to a passport," she said.

New passport staff coming 

“Hundreds of additional staff” are in the State Department hiring pipeline, and from January through June, the department authorized at least 30,000 overtime hours each month, sometimes as much as 40,000 hours, she said. The department also created “surge teams” of retirees and new hires who adjudicate passports before reporting to other departments. The department has tripled the number of phone lines available at the Passport Information Center where people can call to make an appointment at a passport agency, she said.   

Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, said the State Department could be tilting against macroeconomic reality: They “say they’re trying to hire people as quickly as possible, but given that unemployment is at close to an all-time low, it’s tough to hire people.”

Demand for passports may be especially high on Long Island and in the greater New York City area because of relatively large segments of the population who are immigrants, or have the money to travel, and because of the proximity of international airports such as JFK, he said. 

Zagorsky advocates several steps to ease the crush, including ending the passport requirement for some Caribbean nations and allowing Americans to use a current passport while waiting for renewal instead of sending them in with their renewal forms. 

Long Island’s congressional delegation is also seeking solutions. Garbarino’s office is drafting a letter to Blinken outlining the problems constituents face and urging the State Department to take steps to mitigate delays, said Cianci, the spokeswoman.

In a Facebook post last week, Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-Island Park) said the State Department “must do better in handling this backlog … The current wait times are unacceptable …" A spokeswoman for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said that her office, too, was working to help constituents amid an “unprecedented surge in demand for passport services on Long Island and across the state.”

For now, though, even some Long Islanders who got their passports and made their trips are frustrated.

Liam Foley, a Hicksville electrician, said he paid more than $650 last summer to a third-party expediter to make sure he got his passport renewed in time for a flight to see his mother in Spain. The expediter found him an appointment in Boston. It was a four-hour drive, followed by two hours waiting in line, followed by another four-hour drive. In an interview last week, he added up the time and money he’d spent and still sounded peeved.

“The system is backed up and kind of shoddy,” Foley said.