In the first half of 2021, the United States State Department had an epic backlog of 2 million passport applications. As the Biden Administration began, the wait time for a new passport—18 weeks, or more than 4 months—was so crazy that the U.S. government had to warn that "U.S. citizens who wish to travel overseas this…
A year ago, as the U.S. government continued to climb out of the bureaucratic hole that Covid-19 and staffing woes had dug, the wait time for a new passport was as long as 13 weeks. During some periods in late 2022 and early 2023, the State Department received some 500,000 applications a week, the highest…