I am not sure if any of you have personally suffered from this yet, (or know someone who has) but new travel restrictions requiring passports for ALL travel in and out of the United States, (including to formerly exempt Mexico and Canada) have created a major backlog in processing of both new and renewal passports. This brilliant program, intended to secure our borders from the mean and nasty 'evil doers' who want to get in and do harm to you, me, and the kids and the dog, is known as the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative.
The result has been an increase in passport applications which the Bush Administration (brace yourselves...) did not anticipate! And the further result of all of this sudden scrambling for passports, believe it or not, is that some travelers have actually been forced to miss flights, cancel vacations, and lose any money spent on airline tickets and deposits!
Yep. Folks are losing money. Unbelievable right? Well just look here, here, and here for just a few of the horror stories.
And in the last story, from Albuquerque, the extent of the disaster has made New Mexico's resident super-genius congresswoman (aka Heather Wilson) realize that the government should suspend the new law!!!:
Wilson and others attribute mounting passport delays to that law - and the record number of passport applications that have followed.
Wilson's office has received 500 passport-related complaints this month, up from a typical one to three per month, spokesman Enrique Carlos Knell said. Passport applications are now taking 12 to 14 weeks, about twice as long as they took before the law change, he said. Suspending the new passport law would ease delays while the State Department works out a long-term solution...
"It's a common-sense solution to a problem that is affecting hundreds of New Mexicans," Knell said. "People are mad, and they have a right to be."...
'ya think?
Furthermore, people not having passports hurts who else? The travel industry:
The executive director of Phoenix-based Association of Retail Travel Agents said Thursday that her organization foresaw problems on the horizon as soon as the government announced that it was going to be requiring passports for those flying to Mexico, the Caribbean and Canada. So, she began advising the 3,000 travel agents in her organization to start preparing by handing out passport applications to all customers even if they didn't have immediate plans to travel overseas.
But even with those efforts, Pat Funk said she knows that some agents are losing money because people are waiting to apply for passports.
"I know they are out there, because I have had agents tell me that they have not made sales because these people didn't have passports," Funk said. "We knew it was going to be a disaster, and it was."
Hmmm.... sounds like the TI in WHTI stands for Travel Inertia.
My own story? Well, I haven't lost any money (yet), but I sent in my renewal (this will be my 3rd passport) the second week of February.
That was 14 weeks ago. 14 weeks!
However, all is not lost. You can always call up your congressman or woman and get them to pull some strings, and smooth things over so you get that little blue book in time. (Oh yeah that's gotta be an efficient way to do things) I mean, I am sure Charlie Rangel has time to give to me, and me alone, to get my passport which should have been here weeks ago.
Of course, with a little planning, (just a little) this all could have been avoided. It was Bush's State Department after all, headed by the redoubtable Condi Rice, which approved the changes, and it is his State Department, which oversees the handful of Passport Processing Centers scattered throughout the land, that should have been geared up to accept the increased load. How much of an increase? One spokesman says up to 17 million passports this year, up from 12.1 million last, and the most recent quote says applications are up 33 percent.
But fear not- if you pay additional for "expedited" service $80.80 including postage (on top of the standard $97 fee), they'll speed the whole thing up just for you, and get that wait down to 4 weeks. But that's naturally all part of the Bush Maladminstration's goal of making this country by, for, and of the rich. And I (for one) refuse to play.
What can I say? Incompetence, thy name is Bush.
The bigger lesson? Republicans running the government (which in their heart of hearts they don't believe in) usually guarantees incompetence.
And after all, it is just another "heckuva job", although perhaps we need to pull out Dick Gephardt's "miserable failure".
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UPDATE from comment by Zwoof: Good Lord, Bush didn't even know!:
President Bush said yesterday that he was surprised by his administration's plans to require U.S. citizens to show a passport when reentering the country from Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean, and he ordered an administration review of whether the entry rules should be relaxed...
"When I first read that in the newspaper about the need to have passports, particularly the day crossings that take place, about a million for instance in the state of Texas, I said, 'What's going on here?'"