Schumer Calls For Bush To Act On Passport Bill
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Senator Schumer called on the president yesterday to sign a new bill that would address a backlog of passport applications that is causing some New Yorkers to experience long waits to leave the country.
The bill would allow the State Department to rehire retired Foreign Service employees to staff overwhelmed passport processing centers. It passed in the Senate by a unanimous vote in June and passed in the House on July 16.
“It was a bipolar, non-partisan cooperation to get something done,” Mr. Schumer said at a press conference yesterday.
Mr. Schumer stood next to a handful of New York residents who are waiting for their applications to be processed. One woman, Elizabeth Lebowitz, has never left the country and is scheduled to fly to Germany on Tuesday. She was told her passport application would only take 10 weeks, but after 13 weeks she is still waiting.
The backlog was caused by a new set of regulations that require Americans to have passports when traveling to Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
