The Post Office: don't tell me the government "can't handle it."

[DFW]

Over the summer, while in the States, I tried to get my passport renewed, since it was expiring in January.

Boston said it would take six months, due to the backlog. Washington repeated the same thing. Even my Senator, Cornyn, who is running for re-election, said the same thing. Sorry, we can't help you. They said try the US consulate in Frankfurt, as they could issue me a one-year emergency passport. Mine was expiring in January, and I don't know if I'll be in the States before that, so I flew back to Germany, and went down to the US consulate in Frankfurt on August 20. They said four weeks, but for a normal new passport, good for the next ten years. Better than six months, at least, and better than an emergency passport only good a year.

Well, well. Today, FedEx delivers my new passport, issued in Washington, that I applied for in Frankfurt 12 days ago. Here to my home near Düsseldorf, and sent from the consulate in Frankfurt, so it arrived there yesterday.

So, don't believe DeJoy when he says the government can't do this or can't do that. Sure it CAN. Of course, if it is ordered NOT to, then it won't.

[CTyankee]

1. We just renewed ours. I was worried but we didn't have any travel looming, besides, no country

I want to go to will have us so what's the point?

then we got the passports. A couple of weeks after the time the guy in the post office told me it would take (before the coronavirus panic).

My advice: don't go looking for trouble.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

2. Every time I have gotten a passport, from the very first one in 1970

to my current one back in 2015, they have always arrived much sooner than I was told it would take. I wonder if they don't always give people an unrealistically long time so that people don't get anxious and start panicking when it doesn't arrive inside two weeks. I don't believe any of my passports took longer than three weeks to get to me. I have always been pleasantly surprised at how quickly they came.

[Enterstageleft]

3. Just renewed ours

Our passports expired in July. We applied for renewals in early April, & finally received them in mid August.

It's possible the pandemic had slowed the response, but I still think this has to be the most inept administration in history.

[DFW]

4. When I called the State Department in July

I actually got through to a live person in their consular affairs department, and they told me that due to the virus, and the fact that processing passports was one activity that could NOT be done remotely, they had a backlog of one million passport applications (of all sorts), and that was the reason for the big delay.

I gave them my application in the afternoon of August 20 in Frankfurt, so at the earliest, even if it left that evening on some special plane for Washington, DoS couldn't have begun to process it until August 21, a Friday, at the earliest. It was in Frankfurt no later than yesterday, August 31, so this is a start-to-finish turnaround of a maximum of nine days, including two weekends. Rather impressive, if you ask me!