Fast U.S. Passport Service Getting Sluggish

For people seeking U.S. passports, faster service is getting slower. The summer’s maddening backlog in passport applications has forced officials to abandon the old standard of a week’s wait for people willing to pay $60 extra for speedy service.

People can expect to wait about three weeks for expedited service, and the government indicated Thursday they should get used to it. A regular application now takes 10 weeks to 12 weeks.

The State Department announced the policy change a day after officials offered a new estimate of the burgeoning cost of processing the mountain of passport applications. It will cost nearly $1 billion over three years to handle the surge in applications created by post-Sept. 11 security rules for travel.

Because of the backlog, officials said they will no longer offer assurances that an expedited application will be processed within three business days of receipt. Instead, people will have to check the State Department Web site to see how fast expedited is.

That processing time is 10 business days. Factoring in shipping time, expedited service usually takes about three weeks. Critics saw the announcement as fresh evidence of mismanagement.

The new government rule leaves open the possibility that expedited service someday may become a one-week affair again. But consular affairs spokesman Steve Roister contended that even under the old system, applicants were told to expect it would take two weeks to receive expedited passports.

During the worst of the delays in late spring and early summer, some applicants who would normally expect to wait six weeks for passports found they had still not received them after 12 weeks or more.