Authority of Secretary of State to Designate Additional Persons Eligible to Serve As Passport Acceptance Agents

Floor Speech

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Mr. MAST. Mr. Speaker, I thank all of my colleagues for their work and support on H.R. 8234.

It is a bill to reduce the passport barriers that American travelers face with just a few commonsense solutions to help make it a more seamless process for Americans and a more intuitive process for when their passport might expire. It would help prevent the emergency situations that all of us as Members of Congress face for our constituents to get the passports they need.

Getting a passport, for many, is the closest that Americans will get to seeing the work of our State Department, and when they see delays and backlogs, that shakes their confidence in what they believe the State Department and many of our other institutions can do.

The backlog is especially troublesome for our citizens who live in rural areas without easy access to the few passport agencies or centers that we have around the country.

If the State Department can't get those small things done right now in a timely fashion and competent way, then it is hard to convince the American people that the State Department can handle bigger things-- except a passport is not a small thing for most people, most families, and most individuals. For our constituents, that is a business trip, family vacation, wedding, or, God forbid, funeral.

We urgently need reforms to address the passport backlog and prevent any future backlog from occurring.

H.R. 8234 enhances U.S. passport applicants' customer experience in three ways that have been mentioned already.

First, it authorizes the Secretary of State to allow qualified notaries to accept and certify the relevant paperwork. Certify doesn't mean that they are issuing a passport. It means they are identifying that all the t's have been crossed, the i's have been dotted, and the blanks are filled in so that the application doesn't get kicked back by the State Department.

Currently, citizens who live in rural areas need to mail in their paperwork or try to get to a certain employee in a place like the post office. They have few or inconsistent hours to actually go see those individuals, and it delays their application process. By expanding the number of people who can accept and certify the paperwork to include these qualified notaries, we greatly expand the options for Americans who do not live near these passport acceptance centers.

Second, my bill requires the State Department to devote more resources to nontraditional applicants--again, often from rural areas-- who utilize private courier services for emergency passport services. Since 2007, the number of slots these private courier services have to process Americans' applications has decreased, while the number of Americans who live at least 250 miles away from a passport acceptance office has substantially increased over that same period of time.

These services are an effective alternative for Americans who need urgent passports and don't live near those offices, and expanding these resources will help serve the citizens by adjusting to population migration patterns that we have seen over the last two decades.

Finally, my bill would make it easier for Americans to remember to renew their passports by changing the passport expiration dates to coincide with their birthdays, just like most of us do with our driver's licenses. This simple change in awareness will make it so that many people remember to renew their passports early instead of realizing it at the last second because it is not on an intuitive date, which leads to the surges in applicants in the system and creates those backlogs.

Mr. Speaker, I thank all of my colleagues for their work on this legislation, and I urge adoption of this bill.

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