America Has Pulled Off the Impossible. It Made Getting a Passport Simple.
Washington isn’t known for tech innovation. How did a team of bureaucrats put their stamp on a process that hadn’t changed in 50 years?
Ben Cohen
ILLUSTRATION: EMIL LENDOF/WSJ, ISTOCK
The process has been more or less the same for a half-century. Fill out a paper form. Attach a check or money order. Get photos printed—and hope they don’t get rejected. Then schlep to the post office, mail back the old passport and wait too long for a new one.
But recently, a team of bureaucrats rolled out a revamped online system to make getting a passport as simple as buying a plane ticket and booking your hotel.
Now you can submit the application on your computer, upload a photo from your phone and pay with your credit card. No paper is necessary. To get a vital document that will accompany you around the world, you don’t even have to leave your kitchen table.
The system has been open to the public for less than a year, but it’s already handling nearly half of all U.S. passport renewals, according to the State Department. And the really wild thing is that people are raving about it. In government surveys, online passport renewal gets positive reviews from 94% of respondents. That’s basically the approval rating of free pizza.
In fact, when a nonprofit called the Partnership for Public Service honored federal employees for all kinds of fascinating stuff that most Americans have no clue their government does for them, this year’s list of award winners included Treasury Department fraud detectives, a National Nuclear Security Administration star who helped develop the world’s fastest supercomputer—and the Bureau of Consular Affairs team that put their stamp on passports.
Because of their work, more than three million Americans have now renewed their passports online. As it happens, I’m one of them.
I was surprised when I learned this option existed. I was shocked when it actually worked.
Once I confirmed that I met the eligibility criteria, the whole application took 15 minutes from start to finish. At the end, I got an email warning that the routine processing time was four-to-six weeks. This was the only time I felt misled: My new passport arrived in less than two weeks.
The experience was so weirdly efficient and unexpectedly refreshing that I had to find the people responsible and find out how they did it.
There were hundreds of people involved, but the Online Passport Renewal team was led by Luis Coronado, the Bureau of Consular Affairs’s chief information officer, and Matt Pierce, who is officially the acting principal deputy assistant secretary—and unofficially the guy in charge of America’s passports.
Pierce has been a passport geek for his entire career. Growing up, he admired a family friend who worked for the State Department and wanted to be just like her. When he graduated college in 2007, the department was hiring specialists in the Bureau of Consular Affairs to handle the biggest surge in passport applications of all time. He’s been there ever since. By the time he was in a role overseeing passport operations, he knew better than anyone in the U.S. that a tech upgrade was badly overdue.
“The passport process,” he told me, “has largely remained unchanged in its basic form since the 1970s.”
But in the 1970s, the U.S. issued three million passports a year. This year, it will be more than 25 million. Even since the 1990s, the share of Americans with passports has gone from 5% to 50%.
There are more than 1,000 passport adjudicators stationed across the country, verifying applications and guarding against security risks, fraud and identity theft. But the system wasn’t designed for such a heavy workload. A combination of record demand, hiring freezes and higher attrition left the bureau in a tricky position: too many applications and not enough people to review them.
By 2023, there was such a backlog that Americans found themselves waiting months for passports.
As boxes of paperwork spilled into the hallways, bureau officials scrambled to keep up. Long before DOGE, they even brought in outsiders to hunt for inefficiencies. To do their jobs, passport specialists go through a bin of applications, return that bin when they’re done and then grab another. At one point, the bins were moved closer to their desks to save them a few seconds of walking, hoping those seconds would add up over time. But ultimately, the bureau’s power was limited.
“Our only tool to produce more passports was elbow grease,” said Rena Bitter, the assistant secretary for consular affairs during the Biden administration. “Obviously, that had to change.”
It was less obvious how. After all, Washington is not exactly synonymous with tech innovation. For almost a decade, the bureau had discussed the possibility of online passport renewal. But if it were easy to do, it would have been done already. Even today, few countries offer fully digital passport renewal. So most people were skeptical the U.S. government could pull it off—including people inside the U.S. government.
That skepticism only deepened in 2022 when a pilot version of the Online Passport Renewal program caused more problems than it solved.
Suddenly, the same passport whizzes who could fly through 200 applications a day on paper were processing fewer than 10 a day online. The latent tech and unfamiliar system were so disruptive that passport specialists resorted to printing out applications and scanning them again.
When the pilot ended in 2023, the Online Passport Renewal team studied what went wrong and realized: They had changed too much at once. It’s a lesson they kept in mind when they decided to give the program another shot in 2024.
This time, they launched a tightly controlled beta version and scaled up carefully. They expanded access in phases over three months starting last June and collected feedback every step of the way. They fixed errors that could have made millions of Americans crazy, like a bug that resulted in photos getting rejected without explanation. And last September, it finally happened: Online Passport Renewal opened to the general public.
Soon afterward, Pierce was boarding a cruise for a family vacation when his phone kept ringing until he picked up.
“It was this nice old lady from Arkansas,” he said, “trying to use Online Passport Renewal.”
He walked her through the process—then walked on the ship.
“You will not meet a group of people who are more dedicated to customer service than people who work in passports,” Bitter said.
And when the bureau surveyed Americans like that nice old lady about their experience, 86% said that renewing their passports online increased their trust in the government. These days, that’s not merely impressive. It sounds almost impossible.
Now they just have to wait 10 years for a chance to do it again.
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
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