By Stephen Barr
Monday, June 18, 2007
M aura Harty is at the center of the nation's passport predicament.
She is the State Department's assistant secretary for consular affairs and is running an around-the-clock operation to catch up with a huge increase in passport applications from American citizens, including many flying to vacation spots in Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda.
The demand soared at the beginning of the year, as travelers sought to comply with a new rule requiring passports for all U.S. citizens flying within the Western Hemisphere.
And that demand has created a backlog of about 500,000 applications that have been pending for more than 12 weeks, spawning complaints by travelers who saw their trips in jeopardy. It also highlighted once again how post-Sept. 11 laws ripple from Capitol Hill across the country.
To ease the strain, the requirement was modified June 8, allowing those who have applied for, but not received, passports to reenter using other documents.
Harty's "not happy" with processing times, which are running from 10 to 12 weeks, instead of the usual six to eight. "The notion of customer service is a sacred part of what we do, and part of a long and very proud tradition," she said.
Harty knows that many Americans have seen or read news accounts of frustrated applicants waiting in long lines at passport offices, and she said employees were working overtime to respond to emergencies and extraordinary circumstances. Recently, she said, officials cleared 79 of 80 University of Texas students for their summer study-abroad program in time for their flight.
Many passports are being rushed to applicants through overnight delivery services, she added.
Harty has to balance customer service against national security, because once a person has a passport, they have proof of identity and citizenship, can move fairly easily in and out of the country and may make claims for federal benefits. "This is one of the premier documents on the planet," Harty noted.
In some respects, running the Bureau of Consular Affairs is like running a public utility, Harty said, because operations are largely financed by fees for visas and passports.
That means she has to stretch her revenue to pay salaries for about 9,400 employees who deliver consular services, to run plants that produce the blue passport booklet and to cover unexpected costs, such as helping find lost backpackers in foreign lands and evacuating Americans in distress.
Harty, a Georgetown University graduate and a Foreign Service officer since 1981, has served as ambassador to Paraguay and as the department's executive secretary. She became assistant secretary for consular affairs in November 2002.
When Congress decided in 2004 to strengthen border security, Harty and her staff began preparing to implement the first phase of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which essentially said Americans flying to neighboring countries could no longer use driver's licenses or birth certificates as proof of citizenship.
An estimate of how many Americans would be applying for passports was worked up, based on talks with the Department of Homeland Security and an analysis by a consulting firm. The estimate proved low by about a million applications, Harty said.
In fiscal 2006, the State Department issued 12 million passports and is on track to produce about 17 million for this fiscal year. Applications jumped in the first three months of this year, with more than 5.4 million sent in, Harty said.
To meet demand, Harty hired an additional 925 employees and contract workers in 2006 and added more than 1,200 for fiscal 2007. But the extra staff was not able to hold down turnaround times, resulting in complaints to House and Senate members' offices.
Harty has moved to put passport processing on a faster track, expanding operations at plants in Houston, New Orleans, Miami and Portsmouth, N.H. On Thursday, the department celebrated the opening of the Arkansas Passport Center in Hot Springs, which is expected to crank out 10 million passports annually once it is running at full capacity.
The 2004 law has an additional passport requirement -- that U.S. citizens traveling by land or sea in the Western Hemisphere have a passport or "passport card." This rule could kick in as early as January 1. Congress is concerned that the deadline is too soon. The House passed a bill Friday delaying the land-sea deadline 17 months, and a similar measure is pending in the Senate.
To address travelers' concerns, Harty's office this month announced that U.S. citizens flying to Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and countries in the Caribbean who have not received their passports can reenter the United States by showing a government-issued photo identification and a State Department "proof of application" paper that carries a passport tracking number.
Travelers can go to http://www.travel.state.gov and print out proof of their application. Entry rules to countries vary, however, and travelers may also look up those requirements on the Web site.
If the department's Web site does not provide a satisfactory answer, Harty said, passport applicants should send e-mail requests for assistance. "We are getting to it and answering people," she said.
Stephen Barr's e-mail address isbarrs@washpost.com.
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