Uncle Sam’s Long COVID

Last year, I wrote about long COVID, the mysterious illness that’s somehow affected up over 20% of our country’s bisexual population, as opposed to approximately 7% of the general population. Believe them or not, the COVID long-haulers aren’t the only ones still claiming to be permanently handicapped by the pandemic. Nearly four years after it began, federal agencies are still using “the COVID-19 pandemic and its lingering effects” as an excuse for various delays, inefficiencies, suspended services, and other problems — some more easily fixed than others — as if the internal decisions agencies made during the pandemic were an unavoidable force of nature (they were not). Today, we get fewer, slower, and lower quality services from our government than we did before the pandemic, despite successive years of record-high government spending. Through a series of past and present mistakes, incompetence, and feet-dragging, the American taxpayer post-COVID has been subjected to a de facto austerity regime that isn’t saving him a dime.

Or saving him a headache, for that matter. Need a passport? In October, headlines celebrated the decline in passport processing times. But this is merely a testament to how bad things have gotten. Before the pandemic, passports were usually processed in four to six weeks — an absurdly long time to begin with (in Ireland, passport processing time is typically 10 to 15 days, in Botswana, three to five). Today, the State Department pats itself on the back for only making us wait two weeks longer, six to eight on average — but as recently as December, processing times were seven to 10 weeks, and last September, the State Department was recommending applying a whopping six months ahead of expected travel, just to be safe.

The State Department blames staffing shortages caused by COVID. It laid off workers when demand for passports dropped in 2020 — a somewhat understandable move, given that international travel came to a screeching halt. But that was three years ago. How long does it take to hire someone and teach them how to process passport applications? Surely, there’s demand for a job that pays between $80 and $109k that can be worked remotely, among those the job is restricted to: Peace Corps volunteers, veterans, the disabled, and people who already work for the federal government, among others.