Officials declare passport backlog over

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.

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.

After the rules took effect in January, travelers began to complain that a backlog had developed that was forcing them to wait months for passports and miss trips. Congress was inundated with complaints, and members held a hearing in June to demand solutions. Soon afterward, the department created the temporary task forces. On July 30, President Bush signed a law allowing retired foreign service workers to return to work to help process passports.

The task forces may face new challenges soon. The department has been waiving the passport requirements for fliers who have proof that they had applied for passports. But the exemption expires at the end of this month, and under current plans, land and sea travelers will need passports starting in January.

Colin Walle, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1998, said the department rushed to add staff without adequately training temporary workers who were unnecessarily expensive because of housing and other costs.

“The heat they were getting from Congress and the public was to get the passports out the door,” Walle said. “But when somebody starts looking at how wisely did you spend the money to get the passports out the door, the heat’s going to come from a different direction.”

State Department staff defended the task forces, saying they were well trained to prevent fraud and helped reduce passport processing time. Foreign service officers staffing the Washington office said they got about four days of training.

“America wanted their passport applications processed now,” said Steve Royster, spokesman for the department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. “We’re hiring more in the years to come. Americans are just going to want more passports as the new rules take effect, and we are dedicated to meeting that demand.”

The State Department estimated passport processing from 2006 to 2008 would cost $289 million, and that’s expected to rise to $944 million for 2008 to 2010. Department staff said they could not separate out costs for the temporary task forces.

Since January, Congress has approved State Department requests to hire 800 new consular staff to process passports -- half this year and half in 2008.

But Walle and others outside the department say they need nearly twice that number now if they hope to prevent more backlogs.

“There’s a little bit of fear here,” said Rick Webster, Washington lobbyist for the Travel Industry Assn. of America. “Unless they make some structural changes in terms of major hires, they are going to be stuck in this situation going forward. That’s what concerns us.”

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molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com