Originally Posted by
Valerian
Don’t agree. DoS has witnessed large budget increases of late. And consular services in particular got rather large increases. It is taking nearly ten years to roll this program out where less developed countries are taking a few short years to launch. There has been massive schedule slippage. Some European countries redesign their polycarbonate passports every 5 years. A far better explanation is just serial incompetence, lack of proper program oversight and accountability.
The “user fee” mentality in the US is the big factor in why the US passport application situation is what it is. The European countries in which I’ve had more recent involvement haven’t had the same long lasting affinity to the user fee mentality for passports that plagues US passport issues, so if they want to blow their money on more frequent redesigns and limit validity to 5 and 3 years as much as they do, they can eat it as far as I’m concerned. In the case of the US, we the more common US passport fee paying applicants are the ones who get hit faster and more with cost increases when massive schedule slippages don’t happen and thereby fail to act as a sort of restraint on inflation. The slower the transition the better it is for me.