The State Department looks to build on the success of online passport renewal
The department has now issued over 7.3 million passports through the online system. Compared against a general discourse about government systems being old, clunky and frustrating, the online renewal tool appears to be a bright spot, as 94% of users have rated it positively in government surveys, according to Matt Pierce, deputy assistant secretary for passport services, consular affairs.
And unlike some of the other recent stories of successful digital government rollouts that did not survive into a new administration, most notably the IRS Direct File program, State’s system is still going well into President Donald Trump’s second term, and the department is planning for more.
State wants to pilot online applications for those seeking their first passport, and it’s looking into issuing digital travel credentials, too, said Pierce, who recently spoke with Nextgov/FCW about what made the online renewal process work and what’s next.
Up until 2024, the process for renewing a passport was largely the same as it had been for decades, even as the number of people getting passports has been increasing. In 1990, only 5% of Americans had a passport. Now, that number sits at around 50% — and that figure is expected to continue to grow, said Pierce.
State debuted its first attempt at an online system in 2022, in the lead-up to record passport backlogs the following year, as Americans looked to travel again following the COVID pandemic. At the time, the department was still grappling with staffing shortages caused by a hiring freeze instituted during Trump’s first term.
That pilot worked for some people but was ultimately unsuccessful, one former State Department employee who worked on online passport renewals told Nextgov/FCW. They requested anonymity for fear of retribution.
In technical terms, the first system was made in a waterfall development style. State made a list of requirements and chucked them “over the fence” to technologists who built a tool, they said.
Passport adjudicators weren’t consulted in the design process and had a really difficult time using the system. Applications would get lost because of how work queues were set up, the former employee said.
The department paused, pivoted and eventually opened the system that’s still running now in 2024.
What changed? For one, the department switched to a human-centered, agile design process.
There are thousands of employees who handle over 24 million passports a year, Pierce said, adding “that system has to work for them.”
In the lead-up to the second launch, the team tested the system with frontline employees and worked to make sure that the understanding of those building the new system matched up with the needs of those actually handling the day-to-day passport work. That included considering not only technology alone, but also processes and policies.
And while the department attempted to replace the entire system in the first rollout, for the second, they replaced only the front end portion that Americans see. On the backend, enhancements were made, but the system is largely as it was before, meaning employees didn’t have to make changes, said Pierce, while the department continues to work on a larger overhaul.
Moving forward, Pierce is looking to use the same dialogue with employees that made the second online passport renewal effort successful to find improvements to prevent future backlogs along with a staffing baseline. It’s an organizational transformation, he said, driven by employees to change processes and procedures.
One big shift for the department, he said, has actually been a cultural one in how it responds to risk.
“In the past, we would spend a lot of time thinking about something, working on something, and then here it is. Now you’ve got to live with it for 10 years,” Pierce explained.
Now, employees are more open to taking calculated risks with the understanding that they can pilot changes and adapt as needed, he said, noting “that has been a huge change.”
More improvements ahead
Over a year out from the second, more successful launch, it takes 20 minutes to renew a passport on the new, online system, as opposed to the 40 minutes it took through the old process, said Pierce. The department estimates that it’s saved Americans over a million hours.
The online system currently handles over half of renewals. Some people aren’t able to apply online depending on their situation, although the goal is to eventually make it so that anyone renewing can do so online, said Pierce.
The team is also planning to pilot letting Americans that want to get their first passport apply online in the coming years. That’ll require the department to work through some wonky issues, like how it will digitally validate proof of citizenship documents that State itself doesn’t house, like birth certificates — something that will likely require the department to work out data-sharing agreements with states, said Pierce.
State is also in the early stages of looking into digital travel credentials.
“A lot of people call it the digital passport,” said Pierce, but it’s different from the ID that digital wallet users can create with a passport, for example, which can’t be used for international travel or border crossings.
“I mean something that can ping against the database, like the passport, to validate that it is a valid passport issued by the United States government, and this is the person’s information,” he said.
The department is also working to add Trump’s face to a limited number of commemorative passports, although that news broke after Nextgov/FCW’s interview with Pierce.
New challenges
As it pursues new changes, the department will be working with a different team than the one it used for online passport renewal.
Last year, Pierce won what’s considered the Oscar of government service, a Sammie, alongside another key leader in the passport modernization effort, Luis Coronado, the former CIO for the Bureau of Consular Affairs at State. But Coronado and others have since left the department.
The Bureau of Consular Affairs wasn’t spared from layoffs last year as the Trump administration sought to downsize the federal workforce, although some affected employees were later reinstated.
Other offices that worked on the online passport renewal project have also been shuffled around as part of a reorganization. Consular Affairs’ tech office, led by Coronado, was moved to the central IT department within State, and also was affected by layoffs, said the former employee, who has also left federal service.
“The intent of the reorg is to become a more responsive, a more relevant State Department,” said Pierce, adding that he’s seen “a lot of positives.”
Other departments, including Interior, have also been centralizing their technology operations.
The team behind the online passport renewal launch also included 18F, a digital services consultancy inside the government that the Trump administration shuttered completely last year, as well as the U.S. Digital Service, which was renamed to house the Department of Government Efficiency as the U.S. DOGE Service.
“We lost a lot of the folks that had been integral to getting that online passport renewal successfully stood up and out the door for the 2.0 version,” said the former employee.
These teams helped other agencies adopt different models of modernizing, such as the IRS with Direct File.
“The federal government has lost a lot of that,” the former employee said. “How is the government — absent those organizations — going to continue to transform how the government improves services?”
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