Americans Can't Travel Because State Department Employees Won't Work
Massive passport-processing delays, due to COVID restrictions and staffing shortages, are ruining summer travel plans and prompting fantastical workarounds.


Next week, my dual-citizen wife will take a previously unplanned five-hour flight from New York to a city out west, rent an expensive car (all car rentals are expensive nowadays), drive a couple of hours, spend the night at a hotel, then go to a first-thing-in-the-morning appointment at a State Department agency to receive her "expedited" U.S. passport renewal that she originally applied for more than three months ago.


This thousand-dollar detour, made necessary by our pending trip to see the in-laws in France (COVID having scrambled the ability for dual nationals to traverse freely between countries on just one of the two passports), has been playing out all over the country, as Americans with immovable travel dates scramble to deal with consular processing that has slowed to a crawl.

...