Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs Rena Bitter on Online Passport Renewal Launch

MODERATOR:  Greetings and good morning, everyone.  My name is Mignon Houston, and I am the deputy spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State.  I’ll be your moderator for today’s press briefing.  It is an exciting day for U.S. citizens, and I am happy to welcome you to today’s on-the-record press brief with Assistant Secretary Rena Bitter on the online passport renewal system launch.  We are now ready to get started.  I’ll begin with a few ground rules at the top. 

This is of course an on-the-record call.  Information may be quoted and attributed directly to our assistant secretary.  We ask that the contents of the call be embargoed until the conclusion of the call.  At this time, I’ll begin by introducing our speaker, and promptly afterwards I’ll open the floor for questions. 

Our speaker for today is the Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs Rena Bitter.  Ambassador Bitter is a career senior foreign service officer prior to assuming her role as assistant secretary for Consular Affairs in August of 2021, she held the position as dean of the Leadership and Management School at the Foreign Service Institute.  And from 2016 to 2020, she was ambassador to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.  Her Washington experience includes tours in the Executive Secretariat, special assistant to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, and director of the operations center at the Department of State.  She has served overseas as consul general in Ho Chi Minh City; consular chief in Amman, Jordan; and non-immigrant visa chief in London, as well as tours in Bogota and Mexico City.  Please join me in welcoming the assistant secretary for Consular Affairs.  Assistant Secretary, you now have the floor. 

ASSISTANT SECRETARY BITTER:  Thanks so much, Mignon.  And thanks to everybody for joining us today.  Just a couple of remarks up top, and I look forward to taking your questions.  Today, more Americans than ever are traveling abroad, and we’ve seen a huge increase in demand for passports over the last few years.  Our goal is and has always been to provide Americans a secure and efficient passport service, so we are really excited that we are now making available online passport renewal.  So this is a new service which will allow Americans to pay, to upload a photo and, to apply completely online with no need to appear in person or to send documents through the mail.  It’s available to those who are seeking to renew an adult 10-year passport that has expired within the last five years or will expire in this coming year. 

The way that you access it is to go to our website: travel.state.gov.  And on our site, it will be able to walk you through a few questions to make sure that you’re eligible to use the service.  We estimate that up to 5 million Americans a year will be able to use this service.  We’ve been testing it for – since June, actually, of this year and actually even prior to that.  We’ve been getting very good customer reviews.  We’ll continue to seek customer feedback as people use the service, but as of now it’s open to all Americans, and we’re really excited about that.  So I’ll pause there and just open it up for any questions folks might have. 

MODERATOR:  Fantastic.  Thank you, Assistant Secretary Rena Bitter.  We will now open the floor for questions from our journalists.  Please use the raise-your-hand button, and I will call on you and assist you if you need support with unmuting yourself.  Looking through the participants, I see the first hand.  Jennifer Hansler, please, the floor is yours.

QUESTION:  Hi.  Thanks so much for doing this call.  I was wondering how long you anticipate the wait times to be using this service and if they’ll be any different than folks who apply through the traditional renewal process.  And then how many – roughly per year, if you can say – Americans are applying for a renewal at this point?  Thank you. 

ASSISTANT SECRETARY BITTER:  Thanks, Jennifer.  So wait times right now – our processing times, our customer service commitment – is six to eight weeks, and – but it – as a matter of fact, processing times – but the time it takes for people to get their passports back – are really historically low.  The benefit of online passport renewal is that it’s a more convenient service.  We don’t expect to have a different service standard for people who apply online versus people who apply by mail.  We just want to make sure that we give the American people a choice to be able to do either. 

I guess your other question was how many renewals a year do we do.  You’re going to force me to do math in public.  Last year we did 24 million passport products.  About 40 percent of our overall workload are renewals.

MODERATOR:  That was great.  Thank you.  And Jennifer Hansler is from CNN.  Our next hand is from Natalie Alms.  Natalie with Nextgov.  You have the floor, Natalie. 

QUESTION:  Hi, everyone.  Thank you so much for doing this.  I really appreciate it.  I’m curious if we should expect more people to be eligible as time passes.  I know right now this is focused on renewals, but obviously people have to get a passport first, so I’m curious if you’ll ever expand it.  And then I’m also curious – I know the pilot was limited in that if you needed expedited processing you weren’t eligible, and I’m curious if that is still true now. 

ASSISTANT SECRETARY BITTER:  Thanks, Natalie.  Yeah, our goal of course is to do as much – is to get away from paper as much as we can as quickly as possible.  So, yeah, we want to – this is a first step in what we hope will be a much longer-term process to be able to modernize the systems that we’re using and to be able to provide a better service – to continue to provide good service to the American people. 

Right now, it isn’t available for people who want an expedite.  I don’t know if that will change in the near term.  But I just want to emphasize again processing times are really very low right now.  So we anticipate that that will remain the case for the – in the coming months.  So yeah, we’ll see.  I think we just want to get this off the ground, make sure that it’s something that the American people are able to use, that it provides a convenient service, and then we’ll see where we go from there. 

MODERATOR:  Great.  Our next question is from Joseph De Avila.  Joseph is from the Wall Street Journal.  Joseph, you have the floor.  Joseph, if you could unmute yourself – let’s see. 

QUESTION:  Hi.  Can you —

MODERATOR:  Perfect.  Yes, we hear you.

QUESTION:  Sorry about that.  Yes, can you explain how this version is going to differ from the pilot program?  Does this mean more people are going to be eligible?  And second, can you clarify:  Will someone whose passport has expired within the past five years – will they be able to renew online as well?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY BITTER:  Thanks.  So over the course of this, we’ve done a couple of pilots, and over the course of this pilot, the way that things have changed is it – is we had limited numbers for quite a while up until recent months.  And as we became – as it became clear that the system was able to handle and to grow at scale, that has been the main change is the number of people that we’ve been able to accommodate.  I think the other piece of this that we’ve been doing is through the pilot we have been super, super engaged with the customers.  So as we get customer feedback, we’ve been improving things like the photo tool.  We’ve been improving the information that we give, the instructions that we give so that people are able to use the system more easily.  And we’re going to continue to do that, to continue – people who use the system will get a customer feedback survey, because we want to make sure that we’re continuing to respond to their feedback. 

The other thing that’s different is it is now going to be available 24/7, so people are going to be able to apply from their home.  But we were kind of closing it off at a certain time every day, but we’re not going to do that anymore. 

And I guess your other question was yes, exactly, if your – if your passport expired within the last five years, you’ll be able to renew online.  But I do caution people, there’ll be – there are some limitations where, for example, this can only be accessed from within the United States and a few others.  So that’s why we put up on our on our website and in the app a series of questions that people can run through to make sure that they’re eligible to use the app. 

MODERATOR:  Perfect.  Our next question is from Bailey Berg.  Bailey Berg is from AFAR.  Bailey, please unmute yourself.  You have the floor. 

QUESTION:  Hi.  Good morning.  Thank you again for doing this.  You mentioned that the people that are eligible are those who have a passport that has expired recently or will expire this year.  Does it extend to people who have a few years left on their passport but who have run out of pages for passport stamps?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY BITTER:  That’s a great question, Bailey.  I don’t think so.  But you know what?  I have to – we’ll have to double check and get back to you.  Yeah, I don’t – I don’t think so, but it’s a good question.

MODERATOR:  Thank you, Bailey, and we will be in touch after the call if there are any questions that we were not able to answer during this time.  I know it’s a very limited amount of time with the assistant secretary. 

Our next hand that I see is from Alex Raufoglu.  Alex is from News Agency Turan.  Alex, you may unmute yourself.  You have the floor. 

QUESTION:  Hey, good morning.  Thank you so much for doing this.  Could you please clarify whether the U.S. citizens residing abroad be able to benefit from this service?  You did mention it briefly, but you said the U.S. and some other places.  Can you please shed light into that?  And also, when it comes to processing fee, will there be any difference there?  Thanks so much.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY BITTER:  Thanks, Alex.  Sorry if I wasn’t clear.  You have to have a U.S. address at this point to use the service, so it doesn’t – people abroad are not going to be able to use it right now.  I don’t know if that’s going to expand into the future.  We’ll have to see. 

And then the next question is about cost.  Again, like this is – online passport renewal is really just about convenience and giving Americans a choice, so the cost will be the same.

MODERATOR:  Thank you for that question, Alex.  And we are ready to conclude with our last question for the call.  This is from Tracy Wilkinson.  Tracy from the Los Angeles Times, you have the floor. 

QUESTION:  Okay, there we are.  Hi.  Yes, a similar question in possible areas of expansion.  You said a 10-year adult passport.  What about children’s passports?  What about a lot of people have a second passport, which I think is usually just four years?  Can we renew that one online? Thanks.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY BITTER:  Hi, Tracy.  Thank you.  Not yet.  Again, we want to make sure that we get this right.  So this is where we’re starting with renewal for adult passports within the time period and in the geographic limitations that we have, but we are – we will expand this.  This is not going to be the last thing that we do.  We want to see how this goes and then we’ll start looking at ways to continue to make this service available to more American citizens in the coming months and years. 

If you don’t mind – I hope this is okay with you, Mignon – there’s one other thing I wanted to mention.  This is not the only way that we’re trying to make passport services more convenient and available to American citizens.  I just want to remind folks that in June Secretary Blinken announced that we would also be opening six new passport agencies in the coming years.  And the goal there also is to provide more convenient service to more Americans who need in-person service or who need emergency passports.  They’ll be able to access those services much more close – much closer to their homes.  I didn’t want to let this call go without mentioning that that is also something that we’re very excited about.  We’ll also bring passport services – a more efficient and secure passport services closer to the American people. 

MODERATOR:  That’s great.  I just want to say on behalf of the Department of State, I am just so grateful to the work of the team here at Consular Affairs, to the Assistant Secretary Rena Bitter for joining us, for taking your time today to speak to some of the questions that our journalist colleagues have about this system.  To our reporters on the call, thank you for telling this story to U.S. citizens and for sharing this great information to everyone. 

At this time, we are at the end unfortunately of our press call, the embargo has ended, and you are free to use the content of the call.  We thank you to everyone who participated in the call and helped organize this event, and we look forward to the great success of using the online passport system.