This, from the Washington Times:
The State Department has issued an urgent call to its diplomats worldwide to volunteer for monthlong assignments in U.S. passport offices, offering to pay their expenses if they return home and help clear a backlog of 3 million passport applications that has forced thousands of Americans to cancel trips abroad this summer.
In a cable to all Foreign Service personnel on Friday, Undersecretary of State for Management Henrietta H. Fore asked in a desperate plea for 100 diplomats with consular experience to “serve our citizens here at home” for the next two months. “We are looking for two tranches of 50 Foreign Service officers each to staff passport-adjudication shifts, most of which will be afternoon-evening shifts,” Mrs. Fore wrote in the cable, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.“Most volunteers will go to the National Passport Center in New Hampshire in the months of July and August. We may bring others to Washington.”
The unprecedented demand for passports resulted from a law that entered into force at the beginning of the year, requiring all American citizens to present a passport upon returning home by air from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and the Caribbean.
The State Department has acknowledged that it grossly underestimated the number of Americans who would need a passport. Huge lines snake in front of passport offices across the country, and Mrs. Fore said the department receives thousands of applications a day.
Travelers got a temporary reprieve earlier this month, when the department announced that they can re-enter the country before Sept. 30 with official proof of a pending passport application, which can be printed off the department’s consular Web page, travel.state.gov.
I wonder what impact this will have on our consulates overseas, the ones processing millions of visa applications each year, to include those applied for by terrorists.
By the way, the current version of the immigration bill still calls for a US-VISIT program, even though DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff shelved the one mandated (and never fully implemented) by the 1996 law.